Search⌘ K
AI Features
Home
Courses
Grokking the Coding Interview Patterns in JavaScript

Solution: Minimum Moves to Spread Stones Over Grid

Explore how to solve the problem of distributing stones evenly over a 3x3 grid by applying backtracking techniques. Understand how to calculate minimum moves using Manhattan distance, manage recursive exploration of possible moves, and track the best solution. This lesson helps you develop skills to efficiently handle constraint-based grid problems with backtracking.

We'll cover the following...

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 ...