Search⌘ K
AI Features

Challenge: Collect Coins in Minimum Steps

Explore how to determine the minimum number of horizontal or vertical steps needed to collect coins from stacked piles. Understand the problem constraints and apply a divide and conquer approach to design a clear algorithm before implementation. This lesson strengthens your ability to solve line-based collection problems commonly encountered in coding interviews.

Coin collection in minimum steps

Suppose you are given many adjacent piles of vertically stacked coins.

You are required to calculate the minimum number of steps needed to collect these coins (minimum number of straight lines that pass through all the coins). In one step you can collect either one horizontal or one ...