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Tree and Grid Problems

Alex Chen34 min readUpdated 250 real interview reports

Tree and grid problems at D. E. Shaw tend to start with a plain traversal, and the interviewer accepts it. The follow-up asks you to use the shape of the input to beat O(n), or to make a choice greedily from the leaves upward.

Trees here usually arrive as level-order lists, and grids as rows of 0s and 1s. Draw a small case before you run anything. Seven nodes or a 3x3 grid is enough to catch most slips, and it helps you name the traversal order before you write it.

Watch the recursion depth too. A skewed tree or one large region can need a stack frame per node, and Python stops near a thousand frames by default. Know how to move the search onto your own stack or queue.

D. E. ShawPremium lesson · Coding round

The 3 D. E. Shaw problems are below.

  1. A Premium questionCoding · Hard
  2. A Premium questionCoding · Medium
  3. A Premium questionCoding · Medium

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From 250 D. E. Shaw reports, forum threads behind logins and write-ups in Chinese.

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