Most Common Interview Questions

[helius]

If you care about correctness, you must record each move. Simply knowing the configuration at a single point in time is not enough to resume a game while following all of the rules of chess.
With the initial set of pieces, there are 143 possibilities at each turn , although not all of them are legal. That's 7.160 bits per turn. Pawn promotion adds another layer of fun, because even though promotion is almost always to a queen, it is legal to promote to any other piece besides the king.

[sean0118]

"Technically brilliant, with a great sense of humour, lots of common sense and boundless energy, but not very good at answering lazy interview questions"

haha yeah, I think what I need is a book of HR buzz words...     

[GK]

Sounds not unlike 98% of internet dating profiles; especially those of the women from Thailand and the Federation of Russia that keep filling my inbox. 

[helius]

On the subject of chess games, Numberphile has a nice video:


The problem of counting chess games (and therefore, how to encode them) is a fairly old one.
Using the restriction that all games must follow the rules, the space is multiplied at each ply by all the legal moves available to the player at that time. A state machine can enumerate those possibilities in a defined order, which yields a residue for that move that we can then add to get a longer number encoding the state of the game.

Code: [Select]

Integer state = 0
For each move n do:
    state = state*CountLegalMoves(state) + IndexOfMove(state,newMove)
End;
You need to allow for players resigning as a legal move, otherwise the reason for termination is unknown.

[Muxr]

I had a very interesting interview in Imagination Technologies when I had to solve how to save a game of chess using the minimum possible amount of bits in the memory.

I like those type of questions. By the way often times it is not about knowing the best possible answer. It's about demonstrating your thought process. It might take you some time perhaps to come up with the most optimized solution, but showing that you have a methodical approach to solving the problem is often what they are going after.

[jeroen79]

This may be from my very limited job interview experience (went back to grad school for a reason.), but I get annoyed when people ask "What can you do for this company" for an entry level job. Honestly, nothing. You're going to do what you're told and complete menial tasks until you're promoted. You're not going to HELP the company at all, you're simply going to enable it to operate for as long as you work there. Now, that's a perfectly reasonable question for someone trying to land a higher position. I just think it's a way of coaxing awkward answers out of interviewees. "I uh... can uh... improve efficiencies with my light speed hands?" 

Why would that be an annoying question?
Obviously they are not asking about how you would change the company's 5-year strategy.
But that doesn't mean that you cannot add value to the company.

Surely you have strengths that are beneficial for them beyond doing what you're told to do.

What makes you suitable for the job you're applying for? How would they benefit from hiring you?
And if you plan to move on to a higher job, what job are you aiming for?
How would you benefit the company in that position?

[GK]

I'd have to say one that immediately comes to mind was "If you were an animal, what animal would you be and why?" as if the interviewer had some weird degree in psychology and could tell everything anything about me based on my response.

I have my answer for this question, just in case I'm ever asked.

Argentine Lake Duck:

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2001/09/14/366856.htm

[Marco]

You can use probabilites to reduce the number of bits required to encode an outcome. So, in the example you give of 4*(10^40) =~ 2^135 outcomes, you will need 135 bits only if each of the outcomes is equiprobable. However, if this is not the case, then you can reduce the number of bits required to the entropy of the source. This is Shannon's first theorem and the basis for all lossless compression.

Pigeon hole principle still applies. Shannon would only apply if you wanted to store/transmit a random position and wanted to know the average number of bits.

With lossless compression unlikely data is expanded.

[ZeTeX]

Out of interest how do people answer these types of questions:

'How would peers/family/colleagues describe you?'


The two phrases that leap into my mind are 'Very good thank you' and 'Why don't you ask them yourself?'.

But I'm guessing those as responses wouldn't help land a job...   

I'd describe myself as a professional idiot.