CodingHardcod-g732

Subject BfsLevel Senior–Staff~35 minCommon in Algorithms & data structures interviewsIndustries Software development, Computer games

Question

On a 2x3 board you have five tiles labeled 1..5 and one empty cell labeled 0. A move slides a tile adjacent (up/down/left/right) into the empty cell. Given the starting `board` as a 2x3 list of ints, return the minimum number of moves to reach the solved state `[[1,2,3],[4,5,0]]`. Return -1 if it is unsolvable.

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.

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.