LeetCode Card 335 — Shortest Paths / Check
Pattern signal
This pattern usually appears when the prompt involves weighted path optimization or repeated frontier relaxation. Network Delay Time, Cheapest Flights Within K Stops, Dijkstra-like routing, and graph cost problems use this family.
What Check means here
In BASIC, the Check step is where you dry-run the result on edge cases, confirm complexity, and inspect whether the invariant actually held. For Shortest Paths, that matters because the pattern only becomes useful once the candidate is explicit about what is being tracked, reduced, or preserved.
Interview move
A strong move is to review and stress-test before you hand the answer over. In this pattern family, say out loud what representation makes the problem easier: the map entry, the pointer invariant, the recursion contract, the queue contents, or the DP state. That keeps the implementation attached to a reason.
Common miss
Candidates confuse unweighted BFS with weighted shortest-path logic. BASIC reduces that risk because the stage sequence forces you to earn the implementation instead of jumping straight into it.
BASIC prompt
“Given that this looks like Shortest Paths, what is the simplest way to dry-run the result on edge cases, confirm complexity, and inspect whether the invariant actually held?”