Traverse Matrix in Diagonal strips

Question

I thought this problem had a trivial solution, couple of for loops and some fancy counters, but apparently it is rather more complicated.

So my question is, how woul

Answer 1

I thought this problem had a trivial solution, couple of for loops and some fancy counters

Precisely.

The important thing to notice is that if you give each item an index (i, j) then items on the same diagonal have the same value j+n–i, where n is the width of your matrix. So if you iterate over the matrix in the usual way (i.e. nested loops over i and j) then you can keep track of the diagonals in an array that is addressed in the above mentioned way.