Feature #5: Maximum Contiguous Area
Explore techniques to calculate the maximum contiguous area of satisfactory cellular coverage within a rectangular grid. Learn how to traverse and track connected cells efficiently, managing visited areas to determine the largest coverage zone while understanding time and space complexity considerations.
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Description
In a busy city center, our cellular operator surveyed a mall, which was rectangular in shape. They identified locations within the mall where cellular network signals were satisfactorily high. The result of the study was stored in the form of a rectangular grid of 0s and 1s. Each cell in the matrix is found to correspond to a unit area in the mall. If the value in a cell of this matrix is 1, then this means that the corresponding location in the mall has satisfactory network coverage.
Given an m x n rectangular grid, representing the network coverage in the unit areas, we want to determine the maximum contiguous area with satisfactory coverage.
The maximum contiguous area corresponds to the 4 directionally adjacent (horizontal and vertical) cells with high network coverage, that is, the cells with the value 1 in them.
Let’s review a few examples:
Solution
We want to know the area of each connected shape in the grid, and then take the maximum of these.
Suppose we land on a cell, (r, c), where r represents the row, and c represents the column. In that case, we will need to explore every cell connected to it 4-directionally and recursively all ...