Typical programming interview questions.

Re:Typical programming interview questions. by lkozma on Monday February 21, 2011 @05:30AM (#2244970)

I agree about 31 but not necessarily about zebra or pi. A reasonably meaningful metric is compressibility of the sequence, or how short code could produce it. Although that just opens a different can of worms, it could be argued that 31,41 is better solution than the one given in answer in OP which is better than pi or zebra.

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Re:Typical programming interview questions. by patio11 on Monday February 21, 2011 @05:45AM (#2244994)

That is begging the question -- it moves the "I am totally winging this because it makes me feel superior" from the "prefer 'elegant' answers" to "prefer 'elegant' languages for writing compressed descriptions of problems".

A rigorous program expressing the sequences to which "pi" and "zebra" are the next answers takes only 0 bits and 1 bits respectively to compress in Patio11, a pedantic language created purely for the purpose of this post. It is far more rigorous than either English or C-style pseudocode, has a well-defined grammar, and could have an interpreter written in any common programming language that would fit on the side of a business card.

I stick with the original contention: any problem of this nature is about either identifying birds of a feather or lording one's intellectual superiority over the candidate.

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Re:Typical programming interview questions. by lkozma on Monday February 21, 2011 @09:04AM (#2245409)

The problem arises when you are asked to provide further (possibly infinite nr) elements of the sequence: the first would still compress nicely as

"a(i)=i*10+1."

yours would be "a(3)=pi, a(4)=zebra, a(5)=cheetah, a(6)=akrcqfztaf a(7)=666" etc.

But I agree, if the question is just "what is the next element?" and so far only 3 are given, your answer is as good as anything else.

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