Code RoomPerfect square stone game
HardPrep Room Coding #1277

Perfect square stone game

CodingAlgorithms & data structuresSenior–Staff~30 min

Two players play a game with several independent piles of stones. On each turn a player picks one pile and removes a strictly positive number of stones that must be a perfect square (1, 4, 9, ...). A player who cannot move loses. Given the initial pile sizes, return true if the first player (to move) wins with optimal play, else false. Constraints: 1 <= number of piles <= 50, 0 <= each pile <= 10000.

Implement
first_player_wins(piles: list[int]) → bool
Examples
in[[1]]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.

0:00 of about 30 min
InputExpectedGot
[[1]]truenot run yetsample