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3/18/2009 10:32 AM |
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Google is famous for its hard i
nterview questions
. When
I lived in the USA I used to listen to Car Talk on NPR, a radio show
that had its own hard weekly questions in its "puzzler" segment.. When
I was browsing the Car Talk web site I saw their
hardest "puzzler" .
A hundred prisoners are each locked
in a room with three pirates, one of whom will walk the plank in the
morning. Each prisoner has 10 bottles of wine, one of which has been
poisoned; and each pirate has 12 coins, one of which is counterfeit and
weighs either more or less than a genuine coin. In the room is a single
switch, which the prisoner may either leave as it is, or flip. Before
being led into the rooms, the prisoners are all made to wear either a
red hat or a blue hat; they can see all the other prisoners' hats, but
not their own. Meanwhile, a six-digit prime number of monkeys multiply
until their digits reverse, then all have to get across a river using a
canoe that can hold at most two monkeys at a time. But half the monkeys
always lie and the other half always tell the truth. Given that the Nth
prisoner knows that one of the monkeys doesn't know that a pirate
doesn't know the product of two numbers between 1 and 100 without
knowing that the N+1th prisoner has flipped the switch in his room or
not after having determined which bottle of wine was poisoned and what
colour his hat is, what is the solution to this puzzle?
The problem sounded difficult but familiar, and sure enough ....
it was written by a man named Alan B. at EFI, Inc
I had worked at EFI when I was in the USA and when I interviewed
software engineering candidates I asked challenging interview
questions, as was common practice there . We interviewers had had to
answer difficult questions to get employed there in the first place so
we had seen it from both sides.
Alan B's question brings back some memories. I am glad I didn't get it at my interview.
A web search found my favorite EFI interview question on an interview questions web site .
How hard can Google interview questions be?
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