2421: Approximating a Constant Range
Description
When Xellos was doing a practice course in university, he once had to measure the intensity of an effect that slowly approached equilibrium. A good way to determine the equilibrium intensity would be choosing a sufficiently large number of consecutive data points that seems as constant as possible and taking their average. Of course, with the usual sizes of data, it's nothing challenging− but why not make a similar programming contest problem while we're at it?
You're given a sequence of n data points a1,...,an. There aren't any big jumps between consecutive data points− for each 1≤i<n, it's guaranteed that |ai+1-ai|≤1.
A range [l,r] of data points is said to be almost constant if the difference between the largest and the smallest value in that range is at most 1. Formally, let M be the maximum and m the minimum value of ai for l≤i≤r; the range [l,r] is almost constant if M-m≤1.
Find the length of the longest almost constant range.
The first line of the input contains a single integer n (2≤n≤100000)− the number of data points.
The second line contains n integers a1,a2,...,an (1≤ai≤100000).
Print a single number− the maximum length of an almost constant range of the given sequence.
5
1 2 3 3 2
4
11
5 4 5 5 6 7 8 8 8 7 6
5
In the first sample, the longest almost constant range is [2,5]; its length (the number of data points in it) is 4.
In the second sample, there are three almost constant ranges of length 4: [1,4], [6,9] and [7,10]; the only almost constant range of the maximum length 5 is [6,10].