CodingMediumcod-g127

Subject BacktrackingLevel Mid–Senior~25 minCommon in Algorithms & data structures interviewsIndustries Software development

Question

Given a grid of characters and a word, return True if the word can be formed by a path of orthogonally adjacent cells, where each cell is used at most once per path. The grid has at most 5 rows and 5 columns. Return a boolean.

Implement

word_search(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.