Finding all adjacent elements in a 2D array

Question

I am working on a project where at one point I am stuck.

My question is for example I have the following 2D array containing 3 different integers.

2 2 2          


        

Answer 1

1. define another 2d array of the same size, initialize all cells to 0
2. set maxval to 0
3. if helper array is full of 1's go to 5, otherwise find a cell with 0 and do:
   3.1 change value of the cell to 1
   3.2 set a counter to 1
   3.3 check all adjacent cells, if they're 0 in the helper array and the same value as current cell in the input array then counter++ and go to 2.1 with new coordinates.
4. maxval = max(maxval,counter), go to 3
5. return maxval

steps 3.1-3.3 should be implemented as a recursive function which takes coordinate and both arrays as arguments and returns 1+the sum of the returned values from the recursive calls.