5 ms·
Are you responsible for the puzzle involving the historical sites search with a google instant style interface? This was a long time ago and it's no longer in t
by djb_hackernews 15y ago
Are you responsible for the puzzle involving the historical sites search with a google instant style interface? This was a long time ago and it's no longer in the archives.
I worked on that one for a looong time, and what bugged me was the screenshot of the expected interface had a result returned in like 0.05675ms or something, and I couldn't figure out how to get it that fast. It took be forever to convince myself that it was just a mock and probably should have read 0.05675s (seconds instead of milliseconds).
- dmbaggett 15y agoI didn't work on that one, no, but I wouldn't assume the time was fake either. :) We often had internal solutions (and externally-submitted solutions as well) that were orders of magnitude faster than the average. There was a very wide range of execution times. E.g., we had solutions to the Queens & Knights puzzle (in the archive) that ran in tens of milliseconds, if I recall correctly. Typical solutions we received took orders of magnitude longer. Usually when one solution was a million times faster than another, it was because the fast solution exploited a clever algorithm or data representation -- e.g., representing an 8x8 chess board mask as a single 64-bit register rather than as an array of bytes.
- caseyf 15y agoThat puzzle is here: http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/work-at-ita/hiring-puzzles.html http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/work-at-ita/hiring-puzzle... (The sub-millisecond time was for real)
- djb_hackernews 15y agoAh thanks! However, I'm worried I may take another crack at it now! I may have missed that the time was the time taken for the search algorithm to find results, I think I was under the impression that should be the time for the request/response to happen. Hmm.