Connect Four - Can Play Win

You are given an m x n board for a two-player game. Connect Four - Can Play Win You are given an m x n board for a two-player game. SWE game-engine simulation backtracking medium Frequency Single report Last asked 2026-06-06 Stage phone-screen · onsite-coding Connect Four - Can Play Win Problem Requirements You are provided with a game board of size m x n. Two players, "a" and "b", take turns playing. Each spot on the board contains one of three characters: "." representing an empty space. "a" representing a piece from Player A. "b" representing a piece from Player B. You will receive a specific move consisting of a row x, a column y, and the player making the move. Your task is to simulate placing that player's piece at board[x][y]. After placing the piece, determine if the player has won the game. Rules for winning: A player wins if they connect 4 consecutive pieces in a straight line. This line can be in any of the following directions: Horizontal (Left to Right) Vertical (Up and Down) Diagonal (\ direction) Anti-diagonal (/ direction) Important Rule: If the target spot board[x][y] is not empty (it already has a piece), the move is invalid. In this case, simply return false. Note: The coordinates x and y are 0-indexed. Test Cases Case 1: Input: board = [["a","a","a","."],[".",".",".","."]] x = 0, y = 3, player = "a" Output: true Why? When you place a piece at (0, 3), Player A gets four "a" pieces in a row horizontally. Case 2: Input: board = [["a","b",".","."],["b","a",".","."],[".",".",".","."],[".",".",".","."]] x = 2, y = 2, player = "a" Output: false Input Limits The board dimensions m and n are between 1 and 200. Each cell in board[i][j] will only contain ".", "a", or "b". The player input is always either "a" or "b". Row x is between 0 and m - 1. Column y is between 0 and n - 1.