Wow, I never knew they actually published a paper on it. Coming from a Moscow math school that traditionally had a lot of jewish students, most of whom went on to MSU to study math, I remember studying these exact problems - although in my time, this filter was supposed to long been gone.

As a self-taught programmer that has had to go back to get "cs fundamentals", half of interview questions feel like that - if you just know about x or y data structure for this particular edge case, everything becomes simple/easy.

This was discussed in Edward Frenkels book Love and Math

For a second there I thought you were talking about the interview process for becoming a Jew when they weed out undesirables.