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Question: You have two identical eggs. Standing in front of a 100 floor building, you wonder what is the maximum number of floors from which the egg can be dropped without breaking it. What is the minimum number of tries needed to find out the solution?
Suppose you had a Stack class. Write a new class MaxStack which, in addition to push() and pop(), has a method getMax() which returns the largest item in the stack. Use your existing Stack class to store the stack’s contents.
Don’t just use pop() to “dig” through your stack to find the max—do something that lets you return the max in constant time.
Solution
We could have an instance variable where we hold the max, but there’s a problem—when we pop that item from our stack it’s no longer the max. Now we have to “dig” through our stack to find the new max. Ideally we’d keep track of the current max as well as what the new max will be when that max is popped.
The trick is to have two instances of Stack inside our MaxStack. One holds the actual stack contents, while the other (call it maxesStack) holds the maxes. Whenever we push() an item, if it’s larger than the top item in maxesStack, we also push it to maxesStack. Whenever we pop() an item, if it’s the same as the top item in maxesStack(), we also pop() it from maxesStack.
So at any given point we can get the overall max in constant time be peeking at the top item in maxesStack.
How can you get a fair coin toss if someone hands you a coin that is weighted to come up heads more often than tails?
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What is the most efficient way, memory-wise, to store 1 million phone numbers? Apparently this is an interview question at Google, although this seems like its a bit too easy.
A typical programming interview question is “reverse a string, in place”. if you understand pointers, the solution is simple. even if you don’t, it can be accomplished using array indices. i usually ask candidates this question first, so they get the algorithm in their head. then i play dirty by asking them to reverse the string word by word, in place. for example if our string is “the house is blue”, the return value would be “blue is house the”. the words are reversed, but the letters are still in order (within the word).
Problem: you have 100 doors in a row that are all initially closed. you make 100 passes by the doors starting with the first door every time. the first time through you visit every door and toggle the door (if the door is closed, you open it, if its open, you close it). the second time you only visit every 2nd door (door #2, #4, #6). the third time, every 3rd door (door #3, #6, #9), etc, until you only visit the 100th door.
Problem: you have two jars, 50 red marbles, 50 blue marbles. you need to place all the marbles into the jars such that when you blindly pick one marble out of one jar, you maximize the chances that it will be red. (when picking, you’ll first randomly pick a jar, and then randomly pick a marble out of that jar) you can arrange the marbles however you like, but each marble must be in a jar.
problem: two trains enter a tunnel 200 miles long (yeah, its a big tunnel) travelling at 100 mph at the same time from opposite directions. as soon as they enter the tunnel a supersonic bee flying at 1000 mph starts from one train and heads toward the other one. as soon as it reaches the other one it turns around and heads back toward the first, going back and forth between the trains until the trains collide in a fiery explosion in the middle of the tunnel (the bee survives). how far did the bee travel?
Problem: write the definition for this function without using any built-in functions. if pStr is null, return 0. if pStr contains non-numeric characters, either return 0 (ok) or return the number derived so far (better) (e.g. if its “123A”, then return 123). assume all numbers are positive. plus or minus signs can be considered non-numeric characters. in order to solve this program, the programmer must understand the difference between the integer 0 and the character ‘0’, and how converting ‘0’ to an int, will not result in 0. in other words, they have to understand what ascii is all about.