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Google Foobar: A Post Mortem
- wbhart 12y agoThis is the first post mortem I found online relating to Google Foobar. I just ran out of problems today, in the middle of level 8. The questions were certainly interesting, and I agree with the summary of the person who wrote the blog post at the link. This is not a cryptanalyst recruiting tool, has nothing to do with a movie, and it doesn't really lead anywhere. It's just a fun set of problems to solve. They do send your details to a recruiter at the end of level 3 (the hard problems are at levels 5 and 6). And you get a chance to look at some interesting articles written by Googlers on problems they solved within the company. The challenge was very well done, on the whole, and it is clear some very intelligent people work at Google. I did encounter a number of errors in problem statements, and found a bug in the online Python editor that is used for the challenge. I also managed to submit an incorrect solution that passed all the tests, which I only recognised after I submitted. The test cases were not very thorough. And for some of the problems you could simply precompute a table of all the answers and include it in the solution, though I personally chose not to do that. As far as I can tell, for those who are curious, there is no secret pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. I had been hoping for at least an ascii graphic of rabbits escaping the clutches of the evil Doctor Boolean, and a link to share "I finished Google Foobar" on social media or something. But unfortunately, one simply exhausts the problem pool and it just stops mid....