How should I practice Swim in Rising Water?

Start by reading the full statement, solve the visible examples, then compare the pattern against related Google phone screen problems in FastPrep.

Is Swim in Rising Water associated with Google?

FastPrep tags this as a Google phone screen coding practice problem when the problem catalog has that company and stage context.

Swim in Rising Water

Google● HardNEW GRADPHONE SCREEN

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Problem statement

A rectangular grid contains distinct integer heights. Start at the top-left cell and move up, down, left, or right until reaching the bottom-right cell.

The cost of a path is the maximum height on that path. Return the minimum possible path cost.

Function

swimInWater(grid: int[][]) → int

Examples

Example 1

grid = [[0,2],[1,3]]return = 3

Every route ends at height 3, so the minimum possible maximum is 3.

Example 2

grid = [[0,1,2,3,4],[24,23,22,21,5],[12,13,14,15,16],[11,17,18,19,20],[10,9,8,7,6]]return = 16

The winding low-height route reaches the target without using a cell above 16.

Example 3

grid = [[7]]return = 7

The only path contains the start cell itself.

Constraints

1 <= grid.length, grid[i].length <= 500.
Every row has the same length.
The grid has at most 200000 cells.
All heights are distinct integers in [0, 1000000000].