It's a different problem. I play a lot of 2048. It's on my watch, fun thing to do while stuck in line or whatever. I haven't the first clue how to write an algorithm to beat it.
Here's how I'd do that: I'd get on the Googly-moogly and start reading up. Probably take me a couple days to get my bearings.
In a 45 minute interview process? Forget it. They think they're testing for someone who can solve this problem. They're actually testing for someone who has encountered it recently in some other guise.
The interviewer replied, "yeah, I tried it at home and thought it was pretty hard too."
Seems like a pretty dumb question to ask in an interview unless you expect the interviewee to flounder.
when i later talked to HR there was no mention of this in the interviewer's report.
When was this? I think the chromebooks are fairly new in interviews, and it sounds like the interviewer didn't read the memo about how it works.
This reminds me of a joke at my previous job, where we always said "the intern did it" when something was wrong :D. The intern that already left months ago of course.
And they expected to be able to run the resulting code afterwards!
Coding with auto-correct is... not sensible. Thankfully they were alright with pseudocode.
Writing code and tests in a Google Doc. I can't think of a much less friendly environment to write code in, except perhaps Notepad. I did it once (for an intra-company interview), and it was nasty to deal with.
The WTF in second place was a blind requirement to know the mechanics behind a somewhat niche game that was big two years ago.