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Re:Show HN: 15-question programming quiz with answers by bensummers on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @04:07PM (#14404792)
The last two questions are little more than "what is the name of the algorithm I should use to solve this problem?".

This doesn't test understanding in any way. How is it useful to determine whether someone can work on the examples you give, let alone the average software engineering job?

Re:Show HN: 15-question programming quiz with answers by ammon on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @04:28PM (#14405014)
The goal of this quiz is to be a little challenging and fun and maybe educational. It's not to judge whether someone can do a software engineering job!

The answers to the graph problems are indeed fairly straight forward. But asking about why one might use a BST in place of a sorted list prompts interesting discussion. And going into Dijkstra's vs A* and iterative deepening depth first search is (I think) pretty interesting!

Re:Show HN: 15-question programming quiz with answers by estomagordo on Wednesday May 24, 2017 @04:54AM (#14408521)
It's highly unlikely that you would be good at solving the single source shortest path problem on a weighted graph, and not be familiar with Dijkstra.

And I'd say it's unheard of that you would know the first thing about the general, unit weight, problem, and not be familiar with BFS.