Maximal Square: the 2D dynamic programming pattern on a grid.
The textbook grid DP where each cell depends on three neighbors at once. What interviewers want is the min-of-three recurrence, plus the reason it has to be min. The answer follows.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
The textbook grid DP where each cell depends on three neighbors at once. What interviewers want is the min-of-three recurrence, plus the reason it has to be min. The answer follows.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
