• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to secondary sidebar

GoHired

Interview Questions asked in Google, Microsoft, Amazon

Join WeekEnd Online Batch from 4-April-2020 on How to Crack Coding Interview in Just 10 Weeks : Fees just 20,000 INR

  • Home
  • Best Java Books
  • Algorithm
  • Internship
  • Certificates
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Array
  • Stack
  • Queue
  • LinkedList
  • DP
  • Strings
  • Tree
  • Mathametical
  • Puzzles
  • Graph

robot standing at first cell of an M*N matrix. It can move only in two directions, right and down. In how many ways, it can reach to the last cell i.e. (M, N) Code it

July 10, 2014 by Dhaval Dave

Robot standing at first cell of an M*N matrix. It can move only in two directions, right and down. In how many ways, it can reach to the last cell i.e. (M, N) Code it.

We need to Count All paths from top left to bottom right of a mXn matrix,

Method1 Recursive and DP :

We can go backword from (M,N) to (1,1)
As we can take only Up and Left Direction one step , from there we can take either M-1 or N-1

int NumberOfWaysMN(int m, int n)
{
   if (m==1 || n ==1) return 1;
   else {  return NumberOfWaysMN(m-1, n) + NumberOfWaysMN(m, n-1);  }
 
}//Function
As We can see here, there are two recursive functions with m-1, n & m, n-1. Which requires O(N) in worst case space complexity, We can reduce Space complexity and Extra calculations due to recursion  with Dynamic Programming.
Example of Extra Calculations.
for m=5 and n=5, we’ll call

                   Fun(5,5)
                        |
        Fun(4,5)        +            Fun(5,4)
         |                               |
Fun(3,5)+Fun(4,4)                Fun(4,4)+Fun(5,3)

So clearly we are calculating recursive function with 4,4 twice.. which we can reduce if we store results for Fun(4,4)

We need to store result for m and n so we need 2D array to store results.

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
 
int numberOfPaths(int m, int n)
{
    // Create a 2D table to store results of subproblems
    int pathCount[m][n];
 
    for (int i = 0; i < m; i++)
        pathCount[i][0] = 1;
 
    for (int j = 0; j < n; j++)
        pathCount[0][j] = 1;
 
    for (int i = 1; i < m; i++)
    {
        for (int j = 1; j < n; j++)
             pathCount[i][j] = pathCount[i-1][j] + pathCount[i][j-1];
    }
    return count[m-1][n-1];
}
 
int main()
{
    cout << numberOfPaths(5, 5);
    return 0;
}

Time Complexity O(M*N) and Space Complexity O(M*N)

Variant 2  For N*N :

For an NxN square it takes (2N – 2) steps to move from the upper left corner to bottom right corner.
Of these steps, half must be right and half must be down (N – 1 in each direction).
Knowing this, we can look at it as a string permutation or how many ways can you write “RRRDDD”, etc.
(this would be for N = 4, “RRDD” for N = 3 and so on).
Now we just have to count the number of permutations for this string which in terms of N will be (2N – 2)!/((N – 1)!(N – 1)!).
These numbers match up….
2, 2
3, 6
4, 20
5, 70
6, 252
7, 924

8, 3432

-IF YOU LIKE OUR EFFORT, PLEASE LIKE AND SHARE OUR FB-PAGE AND SITE

Similar Articles

Filed Under: Amazon Interview Question, Data Structure, Interview Questions, Microsoft Interview Questions, problem Tagged With: 2d matrix, Dynamic Programming, Recursion

Reader Interactions

Primary Sidebar

Join WeekEnd Online/Offline Batch from 4-April-2020 on How to Crack Coding Interview in Just 10 Weeks : Fees just 20,000 INR

Join WeekEnd Online/Offline Batch from 4-April-2020

WhatsApp us

Secondary Sidebar

Custom Search

  • How I cracked AMAZON
  • LeetCode
  • Adobe
  • Amazon
  • Facebook
  • Microsoft
  • Hacker Earth
  • CSE Interview

Top Rated Questions

Maximum of all subarrays of size k

SAP Off Campus Hiring_ March 2015 Computer Skills

25 horses 5 tracks Find 3 fastest puzzle

Best Java Book | Top Java Programming Book for Beginners

C++ OOPs Part2

Rectangular chocolate bar Create at least one piece which consists of exactly nTiles tiles

SAP Hiring Off-Campus General Aptitude

VMWare SDEII Interview

Stickler thief

Find two non repeating elements in an array of repeating elements

Longest Increasing Subsequence

Amazon Interview On-Campus For Internship – 1

Memory Efficient LinkedList

Possible sizes of bus to carry n groups of friends

Singly linked list

TicTacToe Game As Asked in Flipkart

SAP Interview Questions

Check Binary Tree is Binary Search Tree or not

Given a string, find the first character which is non-repetitive

strtok()

Regular Expression Matching

Find an index i such that Arr [i] = i in array of n distinct integers sorted in ascending order.

Find if a binary tree is height balanced ?

VMWare Openings

N Petrol bunks or City arranged in circle. You have Fuel and distance between petrol bunks. Is it possible to find starting point so that we can travel all Petrol Bunks

Implement LRU Cache

Doubly linked list

Convert number to words java

Generate next palindrome number

Hackerearth : Counting Subarrays

Copyright © 2025 · Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in