Gas Station Circuit — Greedy Patterns
The Gas Station Circuit pattern applies when you need the Gas Station Circuit technique within the Greedy Patterns pattern. Its time complexity is O(n) and space complexity O(1). It is used in 1 problem on Thita, including Gas Station. Common variations are Sorting Based and Buy/Sell Stock.
Find the starting gas station index to complete a circular route using greedy approach.
Gas Station Circuit is one of the 7 subpatterns of the Greedy Patterns pattern, which covers interval scheduling, jump games, stock trading, and task scheduling. The whole pattern is about 3 hours of study. This subpattern is a depth topic for once the core techniques are automatic.
What Gas Station Circuit covers
Master greedy algorithms including interval scheduling, jump games, stock trading, and task scheduling. Make locally optimal choices for global optimization. Problems in this subpattern are usually searched for as gas station, circular route, greedy circuit, leetcode 134.
How to practise Gas Station Circuit on Thita.ai
Read the theory for Gas Station Circuit, then work the problems attached to it in the browser editor. Your solution runs against the problem's test cases, and the AI coach offers a hint about the technique you are missing rather than a finished solution. Progress is tracked per subpattern, so the Greedy Patterns tracker shows this one as covered once you have solved its problems.
Other subpatterns in Greedy Patterns
- Jump Game Reachability/Minimization — Solve jump game problems using greedy approach. Check reachability and find minimum jumps.
- Interval Merging/Scheduling — Master interval problems including merge intervals, insert interval, and non-overlapping intervals.
- Sorting Based — Solve greedy problems that require sorting as preprocessing step for optimal solutions.
- Buy/Sell Stock — Optimize stock trading with greedy strategy. Single transaction and multiple transactions.
- Task Scheduling (Frequency Based) — Schedule tasks with cooldown using frequency-based greedy approach.
- Line Sweep — Master the line sweep technique for interval and geometric problems. Process events in sorted order for overlap counting, skyline, and meeting room problems.
Related DSA patterns
- Tree Traversal Patterns (DFS & BFS) — Preorder, inorder, level order traversal, LCA, and serialization.
- Heap (Priority Queue) Patterns — Top K elements, K-way merge, two heaps for median, and scheduling.
- Backtracking Patterns — Subsets, permutations, combinations, N-Queens, and word search.
- Dynamic Programming (DP) Patterns — Fibonacci, Kadane, knapsack, LCS, LIS, edit distance, grid paths, and word break.
Where to go next
Gas Station Circuit is one lesson in a 16-pattern DSA course. If you are preparing end to end, work the interview-critical patterns first and use the pattern sheet as the checklist; if you are here for one technique, the Greedy Patterns guide is the shortest path back to the rest of it.