Hello, fellow coder! Are you excited to dive into a new, intriguing coding challenge? In this lesson, we're going to explore special traversals of matrices. Using the Python programming language, we'll find our way through a matrix by climbing up and down the columns, zigzagging as we go. Sound exciting? Buckle up, then, and get ready!
Here's the task: you've been given a 2D matrix consisting of individual cells, each holding a unique integer value. Your goal is to create a function that will traverse this matrix, starting at the bottom right cell. From there, you'll travel up to the top of the same column, then move left to the next column, and then continue downwards from the top of this new column. After reaching the bottom of the column, you again move left and start moving upwards. This unique traverse pattern will be performed until all the cells have been visited.
Consider this small matrix as an example:
With the described traversal pattern, your function should return this list: [12, 8, 4, 3, 7, 11, 10, 6, 2, 1, 5, 9]
The first step towards a solution is understanding the dimensions of the matrix with which we're working. We can do this using Python's built-in function. Let's set up our function and identify the matrix size:
