Find minimum cost in grid
Last updated: April 17, 2026
Quick Overview
Given a grid of non-negative integers, find the minimum cost to travel from the top-left corner to the bottom-right corner, where the cost of moving to an adjacent cell is equal to the value of that cell. You can only move either down or right at any point in time. Return the minimum cost as an integer.
Workday
April 17, 202622
6
1,885 solved
Given a grid of non-negative integers, find the minimum cost to travel from the top-left corner to the bottom-right corner, where the cost of moving to an adjacent cell is equal to the value of that cell. You can only move either down or right at any point in time. Return the minimum cost as an integer.
Workday uses this problem in the Phone Screen to evaluate your algorithmic thinking. They expect you to discuss multiple approaches, analyze trade-offs between them, and implement the optimal solution with clean, readable code.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Recognize the underlying problem pattern (sliding window, two pointers, BFS/DFS, etc.)
- Discuss multiple approaches and trade-offs before coding
- Implement an optimal solution with clean, production-quality code
- Handle all edge cases including boundary conditions and invalid input
- Optimize both time and space complexity with clear justification
- Test your solution systematically with well-chosen examples
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Clarify input constraints and edge cases before writing code.
- Walk through your approach verbally and confirm with the interviewer before coding.
- Start with a brute force solution, then optimize. Mention time and space complexity.
- Test your solution with examples, including edge cases like empty input or duplicates.
- Consider common patterns: sliding window, two pointers, hash map, BFS/DFS, dynamic programming.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- What if the input doesn't fit in memory?
- Can you solve this iteratively instead of recursively (or vice versa)?
- What happens if the input contains duplicates?
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Problem Analysis
This problem can be approached using dynamic programming (DP) due to its optimal substructure and overlapping subproblems. The goal is to find the minimum cost to traverse from the top-left corner to ...
Approach
- Create a DP table where
dp[i][j]represents the minimum cost to reach the cell(i, j)from(0, 0). - Initialize
dp[0][0]togrid[0][0]since that's the starting point. - Fill in the...
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