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Count Connected Land Regions in a Grid

Given a 2D grid of land and water cells, count the number of distinct connected land regions, where cells are connected horizontally or vertically.

1. Problem Statement

You are given a 2D grid where each cell is land (1) or water (0). Count the number of connected land regions, where connectivity is horizontal or vertical only.

2. Live Coding Format

Work in the provided coding workspace while explaining your decisions to the live interviewer. Validation may use inline tests, examples, comments, or a verbal walkthrough.

3. Key Focus Areas

  • 1
    Problem clarification and contract
  • 2
    Approach exploration and optimality
  • 3
    Think-aloud communication and pacing
  • 4
    Implementation correctness
  • 5
    Code quality and language fluency
  • 6
    Tests and dry run
  • 7
    Debugging and self-correction
  • 8
    Complexity analysis
  • 9
    Follow-up performance

4. What Strong Candidates Should Demonstrate

  • Clarify adjacency rules and grid mutability before coding.
  • Choose an approach that counts each region exactly once in linear time and justify it.
  • Think aloud while implementing careful traversal and boundary checks.
  • Validate with explicit expected outputs and a top-to-bottom dry run.
  • Analyze time and space complexity and pace the core problem to leave room for a coding follow-up.

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Practice this problem in the live coding workspace while the interviewer probes your clarification, implementation, trade-offs, and validation.

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Core Concepts

Hidden because they name the technique, which a real interviewer would not tell you.

Show core concepts
Grid TraversalDFS/BFSConnected ComponentsComplexity Analysis

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