#### Approach #1: Two Pointer [Accepted]

Intuition

Without loss of generality, a mountain can only start after the previous one ends.

This is because if it starts before the peak, it will be smaller than a mountain starting previous; and it is impossible to start after the peak.

Algorithm

For a starting index base, let's calculate the length of the longest mountain A[base], A[base+1], ..., A[end].

If such a mountain existed, the next possible mountain will start at base = end; if it didn't, then either we reached the end, or we have A[base] > A[base+1] and we can start at base + 1.

Example

Here is a worked example on the array A = [1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 0, 2, 3, 1]:

base starts at 0, and end travels using the first while loop to end = 2 (A[end] = 3), the potential peak of this mountain. After, it travels to end = 5 (A[end] = 0) during the second while loop, and a candidate answer of 6 (base = 0, end = 5) is recorded.

Afterwards, base is set to 5 and the process starts over again, with end = 7 the peak of the mountain, and end = 8 the right boundary, and the candidate answer of 4 (base = 5, end = 8) being recorded.

Complexity Analysis

• Time Complexity: , where is the length of A.

• Space Complexity: .

Analysis written by: @awice.