Bomb dropping algorithm

Question

I have an n x m matrix consisting of non-negative integers. For example:

2 3 4 7 1
1 5 2 6 2
4 3 4 2 1
2 1 2 4 1
3 1 3 4 1
2 1 4 3 2
6 9 1 6 4
         


        

Answer 1

All this problem boils down to is computing an edit distance. Simply calculate a variant of the Levenshtein distance between the given matrix and the zero matrix, where edits are replaced with bombings, using dynamic programming to store the distances between intermediate arrays. I suggest using a hash of the matrices as a key. In pseudo-Python:

memo = {}

def bomb(matrix,i,j):
    # bomb matrix at i,j

def bombsRequired(matrix,i,j):
    # bombs required to zero matrix[i,j]

def distance(m1, i, len1, m2, j, len2):
    key = hash(m1)
    if memo[key] != None: 
        return memo[key]

    if len1 == 0: return len2
    if len2 == 0: return len1

    cost = 0
    if m1 != m2: cost = m1[i,j]
    m = bomb(m1,i,j)
    dist = distance(str1,i+1,len1-1,str2,j+1,len2-1)+cost)
    memo[key] = dist
    return dist