Practice/Microsoft/Design a Connect Four Game

Design a Connect Four Game

Object Oriented DesignMust

Problem

Design the core validation logic for a disc-drop style board game. In this two-player game, participants take turns dropping colored discs into a vertical grid. The discs fall to the lowest available position in the selected column. A player wins by forming an unbroken line of four of their discs either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.

Your task is to implement a function that determines whether a given player has achieved a winning configuration on the board.

Requirements

1. Implement a function that accepts the board dimensions, a list of disc positions for a specific player, and the player identifier
2. Check for four consecutive discs in all four directions: horizontal, vertical, and both diagonals
3. Return true if the player has won, false otherwise
4. The board uses zero-indexed coordinates where (0, 0) represents the top-left corner
5. Discs are represented by their row and column positions

Constraints

• The board has at least 4 rows and 4 columns (minimum to allow a win)
• Standard board size is 6 rows × 7 columns
• 0 ≤ number of moves ≤ rows × cols
• Each move is a valid position within the board boundaries
• All moves in the input belong to the same player
• Time complexity should be O(n) where n is the number of moves
• Space complexity should be O(rows × cols) or better

Examples

Example 1: Horizontal Win

Input: rows = 6, cols = 7 moves = [[5,2], [5,3], [5,4], [5,5]] player = "R" Output: true Explanation: Player R has four discs in a row horizontally at the bottom row

Example 2: Vertical Win

Input: rows = 6, cols = 7 moves = [[5,3], [4,3], [3,3], [2,3]] player = "B" Output: true Explanation: Player B has four discs stacked vertically in column 3

Example 3: Diagonal Win

Input: rows = 6, cols = 7 moves = [[5,1], [4,2], [3,3], [2,4]] player = "R" Output: true Explanation: Player R has four discs on an ascending diagonal line

Example 4: No Win Yet

Input: rows = 6, cols = 7 moves = [[5,0], [5,1], [5,2]] player = "B" Output: false Explanation: Player B only has three discs in a row, not four