Amazon Interview Question

Create a Queue using two Stacks.

Interview Answers

Anonymous

Mar 29, 2012

There was no coding required, only showing/drawing how it would work and describe its algorithmic complexity.

1

Anonymous

Aug 23, 2012

The solution uses two operation swap() which swaps the top elements in both stacks move(0 or 1) if it's 0 them moves top item from stack 0 to stack 1 and vice versa Given stack S0 and S1 move(0)= push(S1, pop(S0)) swap() = x = pop(S0) push(S0,pop(S1)) push(S1,x) So the solution is to repeat swap and move. By induction, a 1 item stack is already a queue. Given this works for i, here is how it would work for i+1 (to make this example simple I will show it for i=4) Since it works for 4 then you have the following stacks: S0 S1 e1 e2 e3 e4 (push new element into S0) S0 S1 e5 e1 e2 e3 e4 (move) S0 S1 e1 e5 e2 e3 e4 (swap) S0 S1 e5 e1 e2 e3 e4 (move) S0 S1 e2 e5 e3 e1 e4 (swap) S0 S1 e5 e2 e3 e1 e4 (move) S0 S1 e3 e5 e4 e2 e1 (swap) S0 S1 e5 e3 e4 e2 e1 (move) S0 S1 e4 e5 e3 e2 e1 (swap) e5 e4 e3 e2 e1 (move, move, move, move) S0 S1 e1 e2 e3 e4 e5