Re:Fast midpoint between two integers without overflow
by lesuorac on Wednesday December 07, 2022 @11:21AM
(#33896207)
> This is an excellent interview question (I used it a lot).
Is it though? It just tells you if they know the trick or not. At that point you might as well have them fill out a form and use the score from that to hire/no hire.
It doesn't tell you if they understand what RAM is or storage (HDD/SSD/etc) or the various buses on a motherboard or pretty much anything about how a computer works. For the example given in the article, it's pretty rare for (a+b)/2 to overflow since the default ints end up being 32 bit (article calls out 64bit tbh) and your parameters are [-1000,1000].
---
> 90-95% of engineers don't even see a problem with (a + b) / 2 until you tell them about the overflow, let alone find a solution for it.
In my experience a similar percentage can't write a working DFS which I think is much more work related than midpoint.
Is it though? It just tells you if they know the trick or not. At that point you might as well have them fill out a form and use the score from that to hire/no hire.
It doesn't tell you if they understand what RAM is or storage (HDD/SSD/etc) or the various buses on a motherboard or pretty much anything about how a computer works. For the example given in the article, it's pretty rare for (a+b)/2 to overflow since the default ints end up being 32 bit (article calls out 64bit tbh) and your parameters are [-1000,1000].
---
> 90-95% of engineers don't even see a problem with (a + b) / 2 until you tell them about the overflow, let alone find a solution for it.
In my experience a similar percentage can't write a working DFS which I think is much more work related than midpoint.