Battleship Probe Challenge | Dataford Interview Questions

You are given a square grid of size N (N>=3); using a probe API find a 1x3 or 3x1 ship on the grid (battleship variant)

Asked in the phone screen, coding stage. Treat grid[row][col] as the result of probing that cell, where 1 means occupied and 0 means empty. Return the three coordinates of the first ship found in row-major search order, checking horizontal ships before vertical ships for each scan, or return [] if none exists.

Input and Output

find_ship(n, grid) receives an integer n and an n x n binary list. Return a list of three [row, column] coordinate lists.

Constraints

n >= 3
grid has exactly n rows and n columns
Each grid value is either 0 or 1
A valid ship consists of exactly three consecutive cells horizontally or vertically
If multiple ships exist, return the first one according to the specified scan order

Function Signature

def find_ship(n, grid):

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Problem