ACME·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)
Jul 2026
Got an OA-style coding problem from ACME about minimizing grid inconvenience by placing one new delivery center. Pretty niche problem, not your typical LeetCode fare.
- You have a grid where delivery centers are marked 1 and empty cells are marked 0. Distance between two cells is defined as the max of their absolute x and y coordinate differences (Chebyshev distance). The 'inconvenience' of the grid is the maximum distance any 0-cell has to its nearest 1-cell. You can flip at most one 0 to a 1. Find the minimum possible inconvenience after doing so.
“Took me a while to even parse the distance definition.”