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Grokking the Coding Interview Patterns in Go

Solution: Minimum Moves to Spread Stones Over Grid

Explore how to apply backtracking techniques to compute the minimum number of moves required to place exactly one stone in each cell of a 3x3 grid. This lesson helps you understand recursive problem-solving, managing extra stones and empty cells, calculating moves using Manhattan distance, and optimizing with backtracking strategies.

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Statement

Given a 2D grid of integers of size (3×33 \times 3), where each value represents the number of stones in the given cell, return the minimum number of moves required to place exactly one stone in each grid cell.

Constraints:

  • Only one stone can be moved in one move.

  • Stone from a cell can only be moved to another cell if they are adjacent (share a side).

  • The sum of all stones in the grid must be equal to 99.

  • grid.length, grid[i].length ...