207. Course Schedule


There are a total of n courses you have to take, labeled from 0 to n - 1.

Some courses may have prerequisites, for example to take course 0 you have to first take course 1, which is expressed as a pair: [0,1]

Given the total number of courses and a list of prerequisite pairs, is it possible for you to finish all courses?

For example:

2, [[1,0]]

There are a total of 2 courses to take. To take course 1 you should have finished course 0. So it is possible.

2, [[1,0],[0,1]]

There are a total of 2 courses to take. To take course 1 you should have finished course 0, and to take course 0 you should also have finished course 1. So it is impossible.

Note:

  1. The input prerequisites is a graph represented by a list of edges, not adjacency matrices. Read more about how a graph is represented.
  2. You may assume that there are no duplicate edges in the input prerequisites.

click to show more hints.

Hints:
  1. This problem is equivalent to finding if a cycle exists in a directed graph. If a cycle exists, no topological ordering exists and therefore it will be impossible to take all courses.
  2. Topological Sort via DFS - A great video tutorial (21 minutes) on Coursera explaining the basic concepts of Topological Sort.
  3. Topological sort could also be done via BFS.