In which standard and board you are ? And how you have cleared ZCO without knowledge of algorithms ? Any book you have referred ? Apologies for all such nasty questions . However I am prepa...

Thank you

This might help- International Olympiad in Informatics: Path to Gold

Can you please share your code for this solution ?

I used the similar approach explained by Mohit Gurumukhani...

Wonder how my program gave the wrong answer... :(

I got the expected output.

Here is my Code:

#include<bits/stdc++.h>

Actually, putting this in intermediate because fluency with STL should be intermediate level.

This is a beginner question!

Probably I over thought it then , :D

This problem can also be solved by using set<int> as set keep the data in sorted order!

Yes, you can implement your own priority queue using heap data structure.

#include<stdio.h>

Since C++ submissions are not running these days, is there any good efficient way to solve this using C?

In general, solution checker is often not implemented properly when multiple solutions are possible (in the practice environment).

Same issue here, even though I implemented DFS (Probably implemented a different order of checking directions than the server's solution)

This is the official explanation for the problem: Indian National Olympiad in Informatics Btw, this problem was part of the 2004 INOI

Yeah, your solution seems a lot more intuitive, thanks for sharing. :)

I submitted Malvika's solution with the following changes and documented the results, they are as follows:

1.Unchanged:

C++: 0.00 sec, C: 0.024 sec