Daily Coding Challenge - The Last Challenge: Bucket Fill 3

Curriculum Help
1

Tell us what’s happening:

My solution to the challenge passes all but 1 test. Test #5 claims the grid can be filled in 5 click but my solution can do it in 4. Am I wrong or is the test wrong?

Your code so far

function bucketFill(grid, targetColor) {
  const gridClone = structuredClone(grid);

  function changeRegion(x, y, color, intermediate = "", dir = null) {
    if (x < 0 || x >= gridClone.length || y < 0 || y >= gridClone[x].length) return;

    if (gridClone[x][y] === color) {
      gridClone[x][y] = targetColor;
      changeRegion(x - 1, y, color); // Up
      changeRegion(x + 1, y, color); // Down
      changeRegion(x, y - 1, color); // Left
      changeRegion(x, y + 1, color); // Right
    } else if (!intermediate) {
      intermediate = gridClone[x][y];
      changeRegion(x - 1, y, color, intermediate, [-1, 0]); // Up
      changeRegion(x + 1, y, color, intermediate, [1, 0]); // Down
      changeRegion(x, y - 1, color, intermediate, [0, -1]); // Left
      changeRegion(x, y + 1, color, intermediate, [0, 1]); // Right
    } else if (gridClone[x][y] === intermediate) {
      changeRegion(x + dir[0], y + dir[1], color, intermediate, dir); // Straight Line
    }
  }

  let clicks = 0;

  for (let i = 0; i < gridClone.length; i++) {
    for (let j = 0; j < gridClone[i].length; j++) {
      const cellColor = gridClone[i][j];
      if (cellColor === targetColor) continue;
      clicks++;
      changeRegion(i, j, cellColor);
    }
  }
  return clicks;
}

Your browser information:

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/151.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Challenge Information:

Daily Coding Challenge - The Last Challenge: Bucket Fill 3
https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/daily-coding-challenge/08-10
GitHub Link: freeCodeCamp/curriculum/challenges/english/blocks/daily-coding-challenges-javascript/6a26df95efa55a2524399746.md at main · freeCodeCamp/freeCodeCamp · GitHub

2

if the start is

 G  G  O  O
 G  Y  B  Y
 B  Y  B  Y
 B  Y  B  Y
 G  G  G  G

clicking on (0,0) you can’t target both G regions, they are not contiguous, but your code does this:

[P][P] O  O
[P] Y  B  Y
 B  Y  B  Y
 B  Y  B  Y
[P][P][P][P]

then the next step is legal:

 P  P [P][P]
 P  Y  B  Y
 B  Y  B  Y
 B  Y  B  Y
 P  P  P  P

but then again non-continuous areas:

 P  P  P  P
 P [P] B [P]
 B [P] B [P]
 B [P] B [P]
 P  P  P  P

and finally last step, also non-continuous areas

 P  P  P  P
 P  P [P] P
[P] P [P] P
[P] P [P] P
 P  P  P  P

A possible solution instead would be something like

 G  G  O  O
 G  Y  B  Y
 B  Y  B  Y
 B  Y  B  Y
 G  G  G  G

[O][O] O  O
[O] Y  B  Y
 B  Y  B  Y
 B  Y  B  Y
 G  G  G  G

[Y][Y][Y][Y] 
[Y] Y  B  Y
 B  Y  B  Y
 B  Y  B  Y
 G  G  G  G

[B][B][B][B]
[B][B] B [B]
 B [B] B [B]
 B [B] B [B]
 G  G  G  G

[G][G][G][G]
[G][G][G][G]
[G][G][G][G]
[G][G][G][G]
 G  G  G  G

[P][P][P][P]
[P][P][P][P]
[P][P][P][P]
[P][P][P][P]
[P][P][P][P]
3

I misunderstood the meaning of “intermediate color”. My interpretation was that you may use any color to transit between regions. Based on the solution grid you provided it appears to mean you may change the region to any color.