• 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

Top 10 Interviews Techniqes for Campus Interview in IIT NIT BITS for MTech

Convert number to words java

Length of the longest substring without repeating characters

Templates in C++

Find two non repeating elements in an array of repeating elements

Amazon Interview Experience – SDE Chennai

C Program for TAIL command of UNIX

HackeEarth Flipkart’s Drone

BlueStone E-commerce Interview Experience

N teams are participating. each team plays twice with all other teams. Some of them will go to the semi final. Find Minimum and Maximum number of matches that a team has to win to qualify for finals ?

C++ OOPs Part1

Sort Stack in place

Get Minimum element in O(1) from input numbers or Stack

Print Power Set of a Set

Check if an array has duplicate numbers in O(n) time and O(1) space

Client Server C program

Flipkart SDET Interview Experience

Binary Tree in Java

C++ OOPs Part2

TicTacToe Game As Asked in Flipkart

Facebook Interview Question : Interleave List

Wrong Directions given find minimum moves so that he can reach to the destination

Find the kth number with prime factors 3, 5 and 7

Inorder and Preorder traversals of a Binary Tree given. Output the Postorder traversal of it.

Walmart Labs Interview Experience

Possible sizes of bus to carry n groups of friends

Convert Decimal to Roman numbers / Romanizer HackerEarth Code

Handle duplicates in Binary Search Tree

Number of Islands BFS/DFS

Leetcode: Merge Intervals

Copyright © 2026 · Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in