Satire or not, I have see an example of what the article is describing. Not Tic Tac Toe, but a more complex problem involving octrees. Essentially, given a scen

Satire or not, I have see an example of what the article is describing. Not Tic Tac Toe, but a more complex problem involving octrees. Essentially, given a scene(hard-coded), it would have to output all octree nodes (specifying white, black or gray if they were unnocupied, completely occupied, partially occupied, respectively). That was a full end of semester assignment. As in, you had the entire semester to do it. We were 'pairing', he was 'driving'. Well, he wrote the whole thing in one sitting, in ANSI C. Even added couple of extra shapes to the program (that we thought were required, but in fact weren't). The bottleneck was his typing speed. I was able to follow everything, although I remember thinking that a couple of spots along the way had more clever solutions, compared to what I would do, were I the one typing. I did not notice any mistakes whatsoever. None. Turns out, neither did the compiler. He wrote the whole damn thing, one sitting, in a single afternoon, and only hit compile once. It worked. First try. Hundreds of lines of codes with pretty high complexity. I later ran Valgrind on it. It didn't even have memory leaks. I had never seen anything like it, and haven't seen since. I'm pretty sure we'll have a new algorithm or data structure named after him at some point. Would I hire him for a startup? Only if it was based on complex algorithms, otherwise he would probably get bored. Even if you do find a genius (and you never even have the chance to interview guys like him, as they can essentially pick their job), you may still need to get a Carmack, not a Dijkstra