You can consider this tantamount to a blackboard exercise. In all likelihood they're looking for basic algorithm stuff. In that instance, in your daily job yo

You can consider this tantamount to a blackboard exercise. In all likelihood they're looking for basic algorithm stuff. In that instance, in your daily job you wouldn't even cheat by looking it up, you'd just use a library. I would assume that they value people who understand how these things work rather than just being able to implement it. After all, you can teach someone basic Python and how to use Scipy in a couple of hours, but does that make them a data scientist? Anyway my point is lots of companies have programming exercises/tests, and I'm not aware of too many that let you just look stuff up while you're doing them. Debate the merits of that, but it's common enough that seeing it in this platform shouldn't feel totally shocking.