CodingHardcod-g021

Subject Grid traversalLevel Senior–Staff~40 minCommon in Algorithms & data structures interviewsIndustries Software development

Question

Given an m x n board of lowercase letters and a single target word, return true if the word can be formed by a path of 4-directionally adjacent cells where each cell is used at most once. The path may start at any cell. The word is non-empty. The board has at least one cell.

Implement

word_exists(board: list[list[str]], word: str) → bool

Examples

in[[["a","b","c","e"],["s","f","c","s"],["a","d","e","e"]],"abcced"]outtrue

What a strong answer looks like

State your approach and its time/space complexity out loud before you optimize. Handle the edge cases (empty input, duplicates, overflow), and say why you chose this over the brute force. Green tests are the floor, not the grade.

Learn the concepts

Vibe coding: describe the solution in plain language (or narrate it) and the coach grades your approach. Generating runnable code from your description is coming next.

Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.