3 ms·
Wait a minute—the ITA puzzles were supposed to be solvable in three hours? I wish I’d known that before I tried to solve one.
by sethg 15y ago
Wait a minute—the ITA puzzles were supposed to be solvable in three hours? I wish I’d known that before I tried to solve one.
- dmbaggett 15y agoIs that too long or too short? I would like to understand what you mean by this.
- jsnell 15y agoI don't think I had a satisfying solution to any of the puzzles in 3 hours. In the most extreme case, I saw some people spend a couple of weeks solving the two-time pad problem. Even after knowing how to cancel out the pad.
- dmbaggett 15y agoTwo-time pad was considerably harder, I think, than average. What about the ASCII maze one? I always thought that one was pretty accessible.
- jsnell 15y agoAh, fair enough, there must have been some simpler ones there as well. It just was not the kind of thing I would have hacked on for fun :-) I was thinking more of all the cool search problems like Strawberry Fields, Traversing the T or Palindromic Pangram, where coming up with some solution is easy, a naive exhaustive search for the optimal solution was not feasible, and where verifying the validity of any heuristics / pruning was not necessarily trivial.
- sethg 15y agoLike jsnell, I spent weeks’ worth of nights beating my head against the problem I selected, and the solution I eventually came up with was not good enough to earn me an interview. I gather that someone with a stronger theoretical CS background than myself would have spent an hour looking at the puzzle, said “Ah, this can be modelled as a graph and solved by applying the Flibblewhiz Heuristic!”, spent another hour coding up a first draft of the solution, and a third hour optimizing and cleaning up the code. My ego has survived the blow of learning that I am not awesome enough to work for ITA, but I wish I had figured that out sooner.