> Trivia CS knowledge questions, such as the one presented here, have their place too: they test whether someone can think on their feet, which is not a bad ski

> Trivia CS knowledge questions, such as the one presented here, have their place too: they test whether someone can think on their feet, which is not a bad skill to have. Well, the author does mention a surprisingly high number of allegedly senior programmers fail at coming up with the simple brute-force solution. At this early stage in the challenge, this isn't "a trivia CS knowledge question", it's simply knowing how to code the simplest iteration over a string and knowing there is something called "a dictionary" which allows lookups! If you don't know this, what do you know?