Code RoomSliding puzzle solver
HardPrep Room Coding #1064

Sliding puzzle solver

CodingAlgorithms & data structuresSenior–Staff~35 min

You have a 2x3 sliding puzzle whose tiles are labeled 1..5 with 0 representing the empty slot. A move swaps 0 with an orthogonally adjacent tile. The solved state is [[1,2,3],[4,5,0]]. Given a starting board, return the least number of moves to reach the solved state, or -1 if it is unsolvable. The board is always a 2x3 grid containing exactly the tiles 0..5.

Implement
sliding_puzzle(board: list[list[int]]) → int
Examples
in[[[1,2,3],[4,0,5]]]out1
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.

0:00 of about 35 min
InputExpectedGot
[[[1,2,3],[4,0,5]]]1not run yetsample