Microsoft conducted their first round of shortlisting for placements and internship. The online coding round was organized by CoCubes like last year.
The test was for 1.5 hrs and had 2 coding questions. Allowed programming languages were C, C++ and Java.
The questions were as follows:
1) Given the head of two linked lists , find the merging point of both the linked lists. In case the linked lists do not merge then return NULL.
2) Given a 2d array of 0s and 1s where 0s represent water and 1s represent land. A connected patch of 0s count as one single water body and if a water body is covered by 1s all around it then it forms one pool. Write a function to return the total number of pools in the 2D matrix. In case a water body is present on the boundary of the array immediately return -1.
Sample test cases :-
Input : 11111 10101 10111 11111 11111 Output : 2 Input : 11110 11111 11011 11011 Output : -1 Input : 11111 10111 10011 11011 11111 Output : 1