## 2022 Twitter Early Career Engineering Coding Challenge
### Introduction
Twitter’s Early Career Engineering Coding Challenge is an online coding competition exclusively for undergraduate and graduate students. The challenge is designed to identify and engage with talented engineering students who are passionate about solving complex problems and pushing the boundaries of technology.
### Problem Statement
The challenge this year revolved around solving a sprawling 2D grid puzzle. Each cell in the grid could contain one of three types of characters:
– `#`: Wall cell, blocking all movement
– `.`: Empty cell, allowing movement
– `X`: Goal cell, the final destination
The challenge required you to write a function that would navigate the grid from the starting cell to the goal cell, following these rules:
1. You can only move right or down.
2. You cannot move through walls.
3. Each cell can only be visited once.
4. The function should return the shortest path found, or `-1` if no path exists.
### Example Input and Output
**Input:**
######
#…X#
#.##.#
#.#..#
#.#..#
######
**Output:**
4
The shortest path in this example is:
(1, 1) -> (1, 2) -> (2, 2) -> (2, 3)
### Evaluation Criteria
The submissions were evaluated based on the following criteria:
– **Correctness**: The function produced the correct shortest path for all valid inputs.
– **Efficiency**: The function ran in reasonable time and used efficient memory.
– **Elegance**: The code was well-written, readable, and concise.
### Participant Submissions
The coding challenge received an overwhelming response, with hundreds of submissions from students from various universities across the globe. The solutions demonstrated a wide range of approaches, including:
– **Breadth-First Search (BFS)**: A systematic method of exploring all possible paths from the starting cell.
– **Depth-First Search (DFS)**: A recursive algorithm that follows a single path until it either reaches the goal or hits a dead end.
– **Dynamic Programming**: Storing intermediate results to avoid redundant computations.
– **Heuristics**: Using problem-specific knowledge to guide the search towards promising areas.
### Top Performers
After rigorous evaluation, the top performers were announced, showcasing exceptional problem-solving skills and coding abilities. These students were recognized for their contributions and given the opportunity to connect with Twitter’s engineering team for mentorship and recruitment discussions.
### Conclusion
The 2022 Twitter Early Career Engineering Coding Challenge was a resounding success. It provided students with a platform to showcase their talents, engage with industry experts, and gain valuable experience for their future careers in engineering. Twitter remains committed to fostering the next generation of engineers and looks forward to future challenges that push the boundaries of innovation.
