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Chris Crawford, the author of the brilliant (for its time) game "Balance of Power," wrote a book about the game and his design process. In it, he pointed out th
by raganwald 15y ago
Chris Crawford, the author of the brilliant (for its time) game "Balance of Power," wrote a book about the game and his design process. In it, he pointed out that the simple facts encodedc in the game--such as the GDP of Ghana or the number of troops in Mali--were unimportant, but the relationship between the facts, the cause and effect between actions countries take and the facts, those were the important things to understand.
Thsi comes up all the time when discussion programmer intervies. No, there is no point in asking if somone has memorized something they can find in Google. But their is a point in asking questions to elicit their understanding of the relationships, correlations, causes, and effects between the facts. Being able to Google the answer to a relationship is not the same thing as understanding a relationship directly.
- onemoreact 15y agoThe problem with "known" facts is they often extreamly context specific. There are actually a wide range of interview questions where I would much rather have someone say "I don't know" than say a correct answer without aproprate qualifications. Because even something as basic as how large is an int is can quickly lead to a bug when someone assumes the usual rules still apply.
- natesm 15y ago> Because even something as basic as how large is an int is can quickly lead to a bug when someone assumes the usual rules still apply. Would someone actually ask this and expect a numerical response? The only correct answer is sizeof(int), right?
- dionidium 15y agoThe sizes of primitives in C are implementation defined, but the sizes of primitives in some other languages (e.g. Java) are defined by the specification.
- natesm 15y agoThat's true, I was purely thinking in C there.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoIn C, it still applies when you use the stdint.h sized types, such as uint32_t and uint64_t.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoThis seems like a case where recognition matters more than memorization. On occasion, it can come in handy to memorize that on most modern 32-bit systems, INT_MAX == 2147483647. More often, it can come in handy to see that number or something close to it pop out in an unexpected place and immediately think "huh, that's (close to) INT_MAX". The same thing applies to 4294967295, 1048576, 65536, and the ASCII codes of various common characters.
- arctangent 15y agoWow! I'd completely forgotten about this game. Thanks for the reminder :-)