3 ms·

I don't think googling is even a valid answer. If he asked "how would you find out how many ridges are on a quarter" then yes (and I think Google it would be ev

I don't think googling is even a valid answer. If he asked "how would you find out how many ridges are on a quarter" then yes (and I think Google it would be everyone's first answer). But counting, as a verb implies the act of measurement, not just obtaining the final number. Assuming that he used that word, it sounds like a trick question.

phkahler 6y ago
I was once asked how many golfballs could fit in a school bus. I blathered on about measurements of the bus, volume of a ball, the average due to gaps between balls, are the seats still there, etc... bottom line we could spend a lot of time getting an ever more precise estimate. The guy seemed satisfied. Later at home I realised that my test engineer friend may have suggested doing an actual experiment - rent a bus and a few tons of balls. The later would be easy since there is a local company here that recovers lost balls from golf courses (even from the water), repaints the and sells to driving ranges. You can buy them in bulk. Which answer is better? Which were they looking for? Who knows.
- MrLeap 6y ago
  If we live in a world where reality is on deck, and not the seemingly arbitrary and capricious one that folks sometimes weave, I think you can determine what answer is "better" with more context. Renting a bus and filling it with golf balls is significantly more effort intensive than calculating, but it might give interesting, real world insights if the values differ. For the purpose of running a business, the choice, to my mind, hinges on how much your revenue / customer satisfaction / product depends on the real world intelligence such an endeavour might bring. The situation illustrated is contrived, so it's hard to contrive an answer to that question. There's hybridized approaches. Here's a 3D/AV interactive developer's contribution to your approach list: I've used lidars and depth cameras as a hammer quite a bit over the last year, so I'd do thus - Realsense D435 capture the inside of a bus. Use meshlab to align and stitch all your pointsets. Perform reconstruction on it so you get a 3d mesh. Use your tool of choice to perform a physics simulation on golf balls (I'd probably use Unity3d, because customers love simulations they can play with.) Run your simulation a ton of times with epsilon changes to initial conditions. Maybe even do it with an evolutionary algorithm that tries to maximize the count! Either way, report back with a distribution. Also capture frames every once in a while so you can give them a timelapse. God customers love timelapses.
- m463 6y ago
  They are black-box testing your mind.

phkahler 6y ago

I was once asked how many golfballs could fit in a school bus. I blathered on about measurements of the bus, volume of a ball, the average due to gaps between balls, are the seats still there, etc... bottom line we could spend a lot of time getting an ever more precise estimate. The guy seemed satisfied. Later at home I realised that my test engineer friend may have suggested doing an actual experiment - rent a bus and a few tons of balls. The later would be easy since there is a local company here that recovers lost balls from golf courses (even from the water), repaints the and sells to driving ranges. You can buy them in bulk. Which answer is better? Which were they looking for? Who knows.

MrLeap 6y ago
If we live in a world where reality is on deck, and not the seemingly arbitrary and capricious one that folks sometimes weave, I think you can determine what answer is "better" with more context. Renting a bus and filling it with golf balls is significantly more effort intensive than calculating, but it might give interesting, real world insights if the values differ. For the purpose of running a business, the choice, to my mind, hinges on how much your revenue / customer satisfaction / product depends on the real world intelligence such an endeavour might bring. The situation illustrated is contrived, so it's hard to contrive an answer to that question. There's hybridized approaches. Here's a 3D/AV interactive developer's contribution to your approach list: I've used lidars and depth cameras as a hammer quite a bit over the last year, so I'd do thus - Realsense D435 capture the inside of a bus. Use meshlab to align and stitch all your pointsets. Perform reconstruction on it so you get a 3d mesh. Use your tool of choice to perform a physics simulation on golf balls (I'd probably use Unity3d, because customers love simulations they can play with.) Run your simulation a ton of times with epsilon changes to initial conditions. Maybe even do it with an evolutionary algorithm that tries to maximize the count! Either way, report back with a distribution. Also capture frames every once in a while so you can give them a timelapse. God customers love timelapses.
m463 6y ago
They are black-box testing your mind.