Minesweeper

What this Minesweeper coding problem tests

This is an easy coding problem commonly asked at companies like Microsoft to assess basic proficiency in grid traversal and neighbor enumeration. It requires you to iterate through a 2D matrix, inspect neighboring cells in all eight directions, and accumulate a count—a fundamental pattern in game logic and spatial reasoning.

Strong solutions handle boundary conditions cleanly (avoiding out-of-bounds access at edges and corners) and convert counts to string format as specified. The problem rewards clear, maintainable code that explicitly manages the neighbor offsets rather than relying on library functions. Both Python and C++ solutions should run in linear time with respect to the grid size.

• 2D array indexing and iteration
• Boundary checking and neighbor enumeration
• Type conversion (integer counts to strings)
• In-place vs. new matrix construction