Cut Off Trees For Golf Event - Leetcode Solution

The Cut Off Trees for Golf Event problem on LeetCode involves finding the minimum number of steps a golf player needs to take to play a game of golf in a given rectangular forest with trees of different heights. The objective is to cut down all the trees in the forest in increasing order of their heights.

The problem can be solved using the A* search algorithm that finds the shortest path between two points in a weighted graph. Here are the detailed steps to solve this problem:

Step 1: Preprocess the data The input of the problem is a two-dimensional list of integers representing the heights of trees in the forest. We can preprocess this data into a list of tuples (x, y, height) where (x, y) is the position of the tree in the grid, and height is its height.

Step 2: Define the heuristic function In the A* algorithm, we need to define a heuristic function that estimates the distance between a given tree and the target tree (i.e., the smallest tree that needs to be cut down next). We can use the Manhattan distance between the two trees as the heuristic function.

Step 3: Define the cost function To find the minimum number of steps to cut down all the trees, we need to define the cost function that calculates the cost of moving from one tree to another. We can use the Manhattan distance between the two trees as the cost function.

Step 4: Implement the A* algorithm Now we can implement the A* algorithm to find the shortest path between any two trees in the forest. We can start by finding the location of the smallest tree in the forest and use it as the starting point. The target tree is the next smallest tree in the forest. We use the A* algorithm to find the shortest path between these two trees, cut down the target tree, and repeat the process until all the trees are cut down.

Step 5: Calculate the total cost For each step in the A* algorithm, we can calculate the cost of moving from one tree to another using the cost function. We can add up all these costs to get the total cost of cutting down all the trees in the forest.

Step 6: Handle edge cases We need to handle some edge cases in our implementation, such as the case where there is no path between two trees, or the case where the starting tree is the same as the target tree.

Once we have implemented these steps, we can test our solution on different input forests to ensure its correctness and efficiency.

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