CTRL+A, CTRL+C, CTRL+V

Imagine you have a special keyboard with the following keys:

1. A
2. Ctrl+A
3. Ctrl+C
4. Ctrl+V

where CTRL+A, CTRL+C, CTRL+V each acts as one function key for “Select All”, “Copy”, and “Paste” operations respectively.
If you can only press the keyboard for N times (with the above four keys), please write a program to produce maximum numbers of A. If possible, please also print out the sequence of keys.
That is to say, the input parameter is N (No. of keys that you can press), the output is M (No. of As that you can produce).

I do believe there should be an O(n) solution, but sort of tricky. The O(n^2) solution is quite straightforward in DP problems.

public static int maxChar(int n) {
 int[] dp = new int[n];
 for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i) {
  dp[i] = i + 1;    // type A
 }
 for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i) {
  for (int j = i + 4; j < n; ++j) {
   dp[j] = Math.max(dp[j], dp[i] * (j - i - 3));    // using Ctrl + V
  }
 }
 return dp[n - 1];
}