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How I feel about things like this: If you're interested in doing the programming challenge, you should do it, because it's interesting to you (and so that compa

How I feel about things like this: If you're interested in doing the programming challenge, you should do it, because it's interesting to you (and so that company tries to give its employees problems that are interesting/has employees that find the same problems interesting as you do). If not, then you're right, it's a lot of time to spend on it. But learning how to go about programming that is certainly not, in my view, a waste of time, or at least no more a waste of time than doing an edifying class assignment. So, in essence, they're filtering for people that enjoy solving interesting coding challenges in their free time. If I'm a company, that is probably a reasonably good filtering mechanism, and if I'm a potential employee, I likely want to be around people who like solving these sorts of things on their own. Also, this isn't as tough a challenge as you make it out to be: writing the game of life is, at most, a 2-hour assignment. So writing a game-of-life-reverser might tack on an extra 30 min. to hour. Then, you just hand-code in the gif into a game of life board, and run it through your reverser. Unless your gif is really large, in which case it might be a little more annoying, but probably not drastically so.

mjmahone17 14y ago
Addendum: figuring at a specific game of life board would be tough, because multiple boards could produce a single result. However, figuring out some board shouldn't be too bad, so you should be able to generate a valid board fairly simply. And now I'm interested in trying.
- nollidge 14y ago
  Indeed, I might go home and dork around with this later, and throw it up on my github page.
freework 14y ago
Just to clarify: It was a 800*800 image (or there abouts), and the GIF was pictoral (it was actually lena). It wasn't a typical GOF board. The question even hinted that if you can't get an exact match, then return a board that "comes close as possible". Without posting the whole problem, it definitely seemed like the kind of problem that would take at least a few days. On the other hand, I once had a company give me a problem that was essentially to build a page that displays products from an API endpoint, and have that page infinitely scroll. That was something interesting, because infinite scroll is a useful skill. I had never implemented infinite scroll before, so in order to complete the task, I'd have to educate myself. And infinite scroll is a skill that I can use again. Conway's game of life in reverse is not a skill I'm ever going to use again, except for the next job interview busy work.
- nollidge 14y ago
  > I once had a company give me a problem that was essentially to build a page that displays products from an API endpoint, and have that page infinitely scroll. I'd probably have the same reaction to that as you did to the reverse-GOL. Sounds dreadfully boring, if that's the sort of stuff they do every day. I don't want to re-use old techniques over and over and over; I want to continuously discover new ones.

mjmahone17 14y ago

Addendum: figuring at a specific game of life board would be tough, because multiple boards could produce a single result. However, figuring out some board shouldn't be too bad, so you should be able to generate a valid board fairly simply. And now I'm interested in trying.

nollidge 14y ago
Indeed, I might go home and dork around with this later, and throw it up on my github page.

freework 14y ago

Just to clarify: It was a 800*800 image (or there abouts), and the GIF was pictoral (it was actually lena). It wasn't a typical GOF board. The question even hinted that if you can't get an exact match, then return a board that "comes close as possible". Without posting the whole problem, it definitely seemed like the kind of problem that would take at least a few days. On the other hand, I once had a company give me a problem that was essentially to build a page that displays products from an API endpoint, and have that page infinitely scroll. That was something interesting, because infinite scroll is a useful skill. I had never implemented infinite scroll before, so in order to complete the task, I'd have to educate myself. And infinite scroll is a skill that I can use again. Conway's game of life in reverse is not a skill I'm ever going to use again, except for the next job interview busy work.

nollidge 14y ago
> I once had a company give me a problem that was essentially to build a page that displays products from an API endpoint, and have that page infinitely scroll. I'd probably have the same reaction to that as you did to the reverse-GOL. Sounds dreadfully boring, if that's the sort of stuff they do every day. I don't want to re-use old techniques over and over and over; I want to continuously discover new ones.