Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

Re:Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format by marshray on Saturday May 16, 2026 @07:03PM (#48164563)

I wrote the "function to reverse a string" in a job interview once. Then the interviewer reminded me that strrev() had been part of the standard C library since K&R.

I'd been programming in C(++) for ~15 years by then and had never had the occasion to reverse a string. I still wonder whether that makes it a good job interview question, or a terrible one. Some of both probably.

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Re:Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format by saagarjha on Sunday May 17, 2026 @09:01AM (#48168558)

strrev is not a standard C function. I actually don't think my computer even has it (it's a Mac).

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Re:Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format by marshray on Monday May 18, 2026 @02:06PM (#48183207)

Well I don't feel so bad for not having known it then. Thanks!

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Re:Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format by saagarjha on Monday May 18, 2026 @06:11PM (#48186476)

Yeah I didn’t know about it until you mentioned it either

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Re:Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format by unrealhoang on Sunday May 17, 2026 @09:38AM (#48168821)

It’s a good one, if you can still write functionally and same algorithmic complexity then it should not matter if you know strrev or not.

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Re:Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format by marshray on Monday May 18, 2026 @05:46PM (#48186154)

Except that an extremely complex algorithm involving large data tables is required for Unicode or other modern text encodings.

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