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Grokking the Coding Interview Patterns in JavaScript

Solution: Minimum Moves to Spread Stones Over Grid

Explore how backtracking helps solve the problem of distributing stones across a 3x3 grid with minimum moves. Understand the process of identifying empty cells and extra stones, calculating moves using Manhattan distance, and recursively trying different stone placements to find the optimal solution.

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 ...