Solution: Most Stones Removed with Same Row or Column
Understand how to apply the union-find pattern to group stones sharing rows or columns in a plane and compute the maximum number removable without violating constraints. Learn the optimized approach that merges stones into connected components and uses path compression to achieve efficient time complexity. This lesson guides you through implementing the algorithm, evaluating group counts, and subtracting from total stones to find the solution.
Statement
Given an array of stones in a two-dimensional plane, where each stone is represented by a pair of x and y coordinates, find the maximum number of stones we can remove with the following condition:
A stone can be removed if it shares either the same row or the same column with another stone that has not been removed so far.
Stones are provided as an array, stones, of length , where represents the ...