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Yeah. I dropped an egg from the kitchen counter and it broke. Ergo, first floor it would break. Except of course, the article doesn't mention what the landing
by misnome 14y ago
Yeah. I dropped an egg from the kitchen counter and it broke. Ergo, first floor it would break.
Except of course, the article doesn't mention what the landing surface is, or whether it is what we think of as an egg, or some hypothetical super-egg. This would seem to be discounted by the "There are no tricks, gotchas or other devious ruses" clause, however. If the point of the article is to make it purely a mathematical problem, then pretty much anything except an egg would work, like "A strong box".
Otherwise, it's pretty much a "work out this problem but automatically disregard anything that I don't think should be part of the solution" interview question, that whilst I have no doubt are asked by many middle manager interviewers, would imagine is a little below microsoft or google.
- skybrian 14y agoI think it's a fun problem and the main reason I wouldn't ask it is that it's probably on the banned interview questions list by now (for being too well-known). An interview isn't a written exam. You don't lose points for bringing up real-world considerations - quite the contrary! But the interviewer might ask you to solve the math problem anyway (perhaps by modifying the question a bit, on the fly).
- dsr_ 14y agoAll it would take to remove the real-world problem would be to change the object from an egg to a ball made of a material of unknown strength and toughness. Poor specifications lie at the root of many a programming problem.
- benihana 14y agoYes but this isn't a programming problem. It's a math thought experiment. The real thing I'm wondering is why are you making a big deal about this? You obviously have the mental capacity to come up with the concept that it's a special material, why can't you just pretend that's what it is and not make a big pedantic joke about it? What is added to this discussion by pointing out something we all know - that eggs break when you drop them from shoulder height.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sopooneo 14y agoI hear you on that, and it can be annoying when people knowingly pretend not to know what you are talking about. However, the most groundbreaking things are often not so much the discovery of clever solutions as the recognition of what the actual problem is. In my work creating custom workflow apps, discovering the question is by far the most difficult part.
- chris_wot 14y agoIt's a fake egg made up of a material of unknown strength and toughness. Alternatively, it is made up of the brain of a thousand people who find irrelevant questions about logic puzzles - they are made of similar material!
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoNo, I think this is a great way to discern reasonable from unreasonable people. Unreasonable people would miss the question entirely and bring up these issues. Reasonable people would quickly disregard such jibber jabber, see what the question is asking, and get on to solving the problem. The alternative is to specify the problem in purely dense mathematical terms. However, I think this way is much better because to understand what the question is really asking without getting into this "eggs break easily" stuff is actually common sense. If someone can't use common sense to figure out what the question is asking without coming up with second grade smart aleck reasons why the problem doesn't work then I think the interviewer would have the answer they would looking for out of the exercise anyway. :)