On topic: The Wednesday Challenge

[Simon Wistow]

On Wed, Aug 15, 2007 at 05:08:07PM +0100, Andy Armstrong said:
> It wasn't compulsory :)

Personally I think it was quite a good question and I've had similar in 
various i nterviews.

What's interesting is that once you've got the central concept - that 
there can only be 256 possible values and that you don't need to sort 
65*1024*1024 numbers then it's actually quite easy but it's getting to 
that assumption that's the hard bit. Ok, so many people here got it but 
I suspect that there are many who wouldn't immediately. What makes it an 
interesting interview question is taking, say, a graduate who went with 
the naive answer and seeing if you could encourage them in the direction 
of the 'correct' answer. 

For people who immediately get it then move onto a more difficult 
question but this could serve as a baseline indicator.