Related Coding / DSA
Cheapest Route Within a Stop Limit
Given one-way routes between cities each with a cost, find the cheapest total cost from a source city to a destination city using at most k intermediate stops.
1. Problem Statement
You are given a list of room booking intervals, each as [start, end]. Merge all overlapping or touching intervals and return the minimal consolidated list, sorted by start time.
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
- 1Problem clarification and contract
- 2Approach exploration and optimality
- 3Think-aloud communication and pacing
- 4Implementation correctness
- 5Code quality and language fluency
- 6Handwritten tests and dry run
- 7Debugging and self-correction
- 8Complexity analysis
- 9Follow-up performance
4. What Strong Candidates Should Demonstrate
- ✓Clarify whether touching endpoints count as overlapping and whether input is pre-sorted.
- ✓Explain a pairwise-merge baseline and improve to a sort-then-single-pass merge.
- ✓Think aloud while implementing readable, correct merge logic.
- ✓Validate with explicit expected outputs and a top-to-bottom handwritten dry run.
- ✓Analyze time and space complexity and handle a bounded follow-up modification.
Want interactive feedback?
Practice this problem in the live coding workspace while the interviewer probes your clarification, implementation, trade-offs, and validation.
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IntervalsSortingGreedyComplexity Analysis
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