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 set of positive integers. Determine whether it can be partitioned into two subsets with equal sums.
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 uniqueness, sign, and zero-value assumptions before coding.
- ✓Explain a brute-force subset-enumeration baseline and improve to pruned recursion or achievable-sum DP.
- ✓Think aloud while implementing careful recursive pruning or DP transitions.
- ✓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.
Continue to DashboardCore Concepts
BacktrackingRecursionDynamic ProgrammingComplexity Analysis
Continue preparing
Build a complete software engineer mock interview plan
Prepare by company
Related Coding / DSA
Longest Strictly Increasing Subsequence
Given a sequence of integers, find the length of the longest subsequence (not necessarily contiguous) whose elements are strictly increasing.
Related Coding / DSA
Minimum Coins to Reach an Amount
Given a set of coin denominations and a target amount, find the minimum number of coins (with unlimited supply of each denomination) needed to make exactly that amount, or report it is impossible.
Related Coding / DSA
Validate the Binary Search Tree Property
Given the root of a binary tree, determine whether it satisfies the binary search tree ordering property across every subtree, not just immediate parent-child pairs.