Number of Islands in Grid | Dataford Interview Questions

A Supermicro SuperBlade monitoring panel represents active components as a 2D grid. Each cell contains "1" for an active component and "0" for an inactive cell. Active cells connected horizontally or vertically belong to the same zone.

Implement num_islands(grid) to return the number of distinct active zones. You may modify grid while processing it.

Formal Specification

Input: grid, a list of m rows, where each row is a list of strings containing only "0" and "1". The grid may be empty.
Output: An integer representing the number of connected groups of "1" cells.
Diagonal cells are not considered connected.

Constraints

0 <= m <= 300
0 <= n <= 300
Each row contains exactly n cells
Each cell is either "0" or "1"
The total number of cells is at most 90,000

Function Signature

def num_islands(grid):

Your question is Number of Islands in Grid. Start with the requirements in the Question tab.

Run and submit as often as you like. When you're ready, talk me through your approach or go straight to the code.

Problem