Jump Game Problem in DSA C - Build from Scratch

Jump Game Problem

📖 Scenario: Imagine you are playing a video game where you need to jump across platforms. Each platform lets you jump forward up to a certain number of steps. You want to check if you can reach the last platform starting from the first one.

🎯 Goal: You will write a program to determine if it is possible to jump from the first platform to the last platform using the jump lengths given for each platform.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an array called jumps with the exact values: {2, 3, 1, 1, 4}

Create an integer variable called n that stores the length of the jumps array

Write a function called canJump that takes the jumps array and n as parameters and returns 1 if you can reach the last platform, otherwise 0

Print the result of calling canJump(jumps, n)

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

This problem models situations where you need to check if a sequence of steps or moves can reach a goal, such as in games, pathfinding, or network packet routing.

💼 Career

Understanding this problem helps in software engineering roles that involve algorithm design, problem solving, and optimization.

1

Create the jumps array

Create an integer array called jumps with the exact values {2, 3, 1, 1, 4}.

DSA C

# Your code here

Hint

Use int jumps[] = {2, 3, 1, 1, 4}; to create the array.

2

Create the length variable

Create an integer variable called n that stores the length of the jumps array using sizeof(jumps) / sizeof(jumps[0]).

DSA C

int jumps[] = {2, 3, 1, 1, 4};
# Your code here

Hint

Use int n = sizeof(jumps) / sizeof(jumps[0]); to get the array length.

3

Write the canJump function

Write a function called canJump that takes an integer array jumps and its length n as parameters. The function should return 1 if you can reach the last platform starting from the first, otherwise return 0. Use a variable maxReach to track the farthest platform reachable so far and iterate through the array to update it.

DSA C

int jumps[] = {2, 3, 1, 1, 4};
int n = sizeof(jumps) / sizeof(jumps[0]);

// Your code here

Hint

Use a loop to check if the current index is reachable and update the maximum reachable index.

4

Print the result

Print the result of calling canJump(jumps, n) using printf.

DSA C

int jumps[] = {2, 3, 1, 1, 4};
int n = sizeof(jumps) / sizeof(jumps[0]);

int canJump(int jumps[], int n) {
    int maxReach = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i  maxReach) {
            return 0;
        }
        if (i + jumps[i] > maxReach) {
            maxReach = i + jumps[i];
        }
    }
    return 1;
}

// Your code here

Hint

Use printf("%d\n", canJump(jumps, n)); inside main to print the result.