Editorial for WC '18 Contest 2 S1 - Laser Grid
Submitting an official solution before solving the problem yourself is a bannable offence.
For convenience, let's pretend that there are two extra vertical lasers with values
and
, and similarly two extra horizontal lasers with
values
and
. Then, let
be the
-coordinate of the nearest vertical laser to the left of Ethan (in other words, the largest
value smaller than
). Similarly, let
be the
-coordinate of the nearest vertical laser to the right of Ethan (the smallest
value larger than
), and let
and
be the
-coordinates of the nearest horizontal lasers below and above Ethan, respectively. The values
,
,
, and
may be computed by iterating over all of the lasers'
and
values, in
time.
We can then observe that the -th microchip is reachable if and only if
and
. This check can be performed in
time per microchip, resulting in a total time complexity of
.
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