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Detect Cycles in 2D Grid

Medium

Provided a 2D array of characters grid of size m x n, you need to determine if there exists any cycle consisting of the same value in grid.

A cycle is a path of length 4 or more in the grid that starts and ends at the same cell. From a given cell, you can move to one of the cells adjacent to it - in one of the four directions (up, down, left, or right), if it has the same value of the current cell.

Also, you cannot move to the cell that you visited in your last move. For example, the cycle (1, 1) -> (1, 2) -> (1, 1) is invalid because from (1, 2) we visited (1, 1) which was the last visited cell.

Produce true if any cycle of the same value exists in grid, otherwise, produce false.

Example 1

Original illustrative diagram 1 for Detect Cycles in 2D Grid

Original illustrative diagram 2 for Detect Cycles in 2D Grid

Input: grid = [["a","a","a","a"],["a","b","b","a"],["a","b","b","a"],["a","a","a","a"]]

Output: true

Explanation: There are two valid cycles shown in different colors in the image below:

Example 2

Original illustrative diagram 3 for Detect Cycles in 2D Grid

Original illustrative diagram 4 for Detect Cycles in 2D Grid

Input: grid = [["c","c","c","a"],["c","d","c","c"],["c","c","e","c"],["f","c","c","c"]]

Output: true

Explanation: There is only one valid cycle highlighted in the image below:

Example 3

Original illustrative diagram 5 for Detect Cycles in 2D Grid

Input: grid = [["a","b","b"],["b","z","b"],["b","b","a"]]

Output: false

Constraints

  • m == grid.length
  • n == grid[i].length
  • 1 <= m, n <= 500
  • grid consists only of lowercase English letters.

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