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Count Interior Islands After Flooding

Last updated: Mar 29, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates understanding of grid-based graph traversal and connected-component detection, focusing on flood-fill logic and the treatment of boundary-connected regions in a binary grid.

  • medium
  • Oracle
  • Coding & Algorithms
  • Data Scientist

Count Interior Islands After Flooding

Company: Oracle

Role: Data Scientist

Category: Coding & Algorithms

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Technical Screen

You are given an `m x n` binary grid representing land and water. - `1` = land - `0` = water An **island** is a maximal group of land cells connected 4-directionally (up, down, left, right). A **closed island** is an island that does **not** touch the boundary of the grid. Equivalently, you may imagine first flooding away every land cell that is connected to any boundary land cell, and then counting how many connected land components remain. Write a function that returns the number of closed islands in the grid. Clarifications: - Two land cells belong to the same island if they are connected horizontally or vertically. - Any island that touches the first/last row or first/last column should **not** be counted. - You may solve this using DFS, BFS, or Union-Find.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates understanding of grid-based graph traversal and connected-component detection, focusing on flood-fill logic and the treatment of boundary-connected regions in a binary grid.

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Oracle logo
Oracle
Jan 9, 2026, 12:00 AM
Data Scientist
Technical Screen
Coding & Algorithms
1
0

You are given an m x n binary grid representing land and water.

  • 1 = land
  • 0 = water

An island is a maximal group of land cells connected 4-directionally (up, down, left, right).

A closed island is an island that does not touch the boundary of the grid. Equivalently, you may imagine first flooding away every land cell that is connected to any boundary land cell, and then counting how many connected land components remain.

Write a function that returns the number of closed islands in the grid.

Clarifications:

  • Two land cells belong to the same island if they are connected horizontally or vertically.
  • Any island that touches the first/last row or first/last column should not be counted.
  • You may solve this using DFS, BFS, or Union-Find.

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