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I don't understand your comment. Was the parent suggesting BFS (or the like) is an exceedingly difficult concept to grasp? And if we're going to claim understan
by mehrdadn 8y ago
I don't understand your comment. Was the parent suggesting BFS (or the like) is an exceedingly difficult concept to grasp? And if we're going to claim understanding BFS is like understanding zero, then wouldn't that just mean it's just as silly to complain about a question on BFS as it is to complain about a question on zero?
- joshuamorton 8y agoYes, my understanding is that the parent comment is complaining that since it took people with phds years to derive an algorithm for the first time, that we should never expect anyone to implement one in an interview. But, as with a concept like 0, making the cognitive leap to understanding that there should be a way to represent the lack of something is counterintuitive (indeed, consider Tony Hoare's billion dollar mistake. The "right" way to represent the absence of an object is a hard problem). However, once you've been exposed to it, it's not particularly challenging to rederive the necessary pieces. So yes, complaining about BFS is, imo, akin to complaining about being asked what the result of the arithmetic operation `35 - 12 - 23` is.
- tzjmetron 8y agoTry and stop being an idiot. If you can.
- SamReidHughes 8y agoAnd it's not like it took people with PhD's years to come up with BFS. You see people make a similar argument about Dijkstra's algorithm, when he picked it as an example of a particularly easy problem to solve.