The expected value of the game is positive regardless of Ballmer’s strategy

Re:The expected value of the game is positive regardless of ... by lucianbr on Friday September 06, 2024 @06:39AM (#41464824)

Is the interview for an engineering position or for sales?

If you're hiring a software developer, I am going to assume all probabilities are about physical processes or data distributions or such, and there is no "if we're asking it means we have something up our sleeve". The data going to be sorted by merge sort is not going to have anything up its sleeve, or set any traps for me.

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Re:The expected value of the game is positive regardless of ... by Majromax on Friday September 06, 2024 @11:01AM (#41466833)

> Is the interview for an engineering position or for sales?

Either way. The coin-flip example and Ballmer's binary search game could apply with simple extensions to complicated processes like SLAs on cloud services.

> The data going to be sorted by merge sort is not going to have anything up its sleeve

That's a curious example, since one reason to use mergesort rather than quicksort is the latter's susceptibility to pessimal inputs.

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Re:The expected value of the game is positive regardless of ... by rini17 on Friday September 06, 2024 @08:22AM (#41465502)

Physical processes are very often long tailed on the wrong end and thus adversarial though.

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