If you follow the links, this was asked to someone interviewing for a job on the Windows team who then posted it to an interview question aggregator, so it's likely that the actual phrasing of the question was lost.
But as best as I can tell, they're considering each 1x1x1 space to be a node like a Rubix cube, and they want a list of all possible paths from the center node to the surface. I imagine that half of the question is making sure that the interviewee presses for details, because there's plenty of problems I see with the question right off the bat. If n is even, there's no single center node, so where does the algorithm start? Can the algorithm traverse diagonally by edges, or only by adjacent faces? Not to mention that there's an infinite number of possible paths for some values of n, assuming paths can cross themselves, for the same reason that there's an infinite number of paths from my front door to my car if I feel like walking in circles for a while.
Great find. This is the most in-depth article I've read on this subject. I actually use this as an open-ended interview question at the game company where I work. The PlayStation 2 has a bunch of quirks with floating point numbers because it doesn't follow the IEEE standard - for example, floats don't become infinity when they overflow, they just get clamped to the maximum possible float. Now you can't use your FPU for the tens of thousands of floating point calculations that are happening per frame. Sure, your processor is faster, but it's fighting with one arm tied behind its back.
Ouch. It's one thing to have your idea panned, but to say "nobody gives a shit about your team"? That's harsh.
It's an unfortunate fact about any creative industry that a person with clout can completely put the brakes on an promising idea just because it doesn't fit neatly into their worldview. This reminds me of the story when Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman pitched Bat out of Hell to CBS. Clive Davis, the executive, says "Do you know how to write a song? Do you know anything about writing? If you're going to write for records, it goes like this: A, B, C, B, C, C. I don't know what you're doing. You're doing A, D, F, G, B, D, C. You don't know how to write a song. Have you ever listened to pop music?"
Hurtful. But even though this guy was a pretty successful A&R person, he wasn't clairvoyant, as the album was a huge hit. It's unfortunate that it demoralized their team instead of serving as bulletin board motivation material.
> Ouch. It's one thing to have your idea panned, but to say "nobody gives a shit about your team"? That's harsh.
Thats the sentence that got me too. It shouldn't be personal and that was very personal. Harsh comments about the idea, the technology used, the implementation, the design or even the presentation is acceptable but to say no one gives a shit about your team is almost like being racist (in the startup world).
I say this because it seems that the judge was making a judgement on someone simply because they might not have had any rockstar engineers or might not (up to this date) done anything of note, which really doesn't mean anything, simply judging the book by its cover without even willing to read the summary at the back.
As you said, this is true for any creative community. The most hard core and painful critiques I have ever seen came at a university architecture design show.
Ask any theatre performer what they think about the critics.
Do you think the experts at the time thought the Apple computer was very good, or that personal computers in general would be anything more than a toy?
Grow a thick skin, or don't listen to "experts". You won't be around long otherwise.
Clive Davis was a piece of shit. But he was a successful piece of shit, so nobody realizes that he's actually a piece of shit. Everyone thinks he's Brian Epstein, but he's really no better than Suge Knight, if you want to make analogies. He takes what he believes are "great images" and puts his own cookie-cutter formulaic music behind it. Fake, fake, fake.
Just like these "judges" of the startup industry. Fuck them.
Exactly. The loudest voices and most effective negotiators are the ones who tend to rise to the top. The Suge Knight comparison is apt - someone with resources and intimidation skills, yet no talent pertinent to the meat of the industry, whether that's music production or tech. The game industry has it pretty bad, too, as far as promoting creatively bankrupt smooth talkers as soon as they've had the slightest brush with success. Try rewinding the clock a few years and pitching Minecraft to any of these guys, and they'd give you the game industry equivalent of Clive's rant, which I guess would be "Do you even play games? You have to have a narrative, an objective, a scruffy white male lead, and the ability to blow shit up. I don't even know what you're doing here, this isn't a game, it's a map editor. Nobody's gonna go for this shit." The solution is, of course, to scope your project like Notch did and release it yourself without listening to the cynics :)
This is why Unity3D is so much more of a pleasure to work with than Unreal. Playing a new animation on a skinned mesh really can be as simple as Animation.Crossfade(). With a little creative thinking, power and simplicity don't have to be playing tug-of-war, they can actually complement each other.
"Is it true that you were bad at math as a kid?" "I was unbelievably slow... I always got lost... I was at least twice as slow as anybody else. Eventually I would do very well. You see, if I could do it that way, I would get very high marks."
Speaking as someone who still struggles with math, and was generally the dumbest kid in the most advanced classes, it's a huge relief to hear that someone as brilliant as Penrose experienced the same difficulties.
Grothendieck is one of the towering figures of 20th century math. He said:
"Since then I’ve had the chance in the world of mathematics that bid me welcome, to meet quite a number of people, both among my “elders” and among young people in my general age group who were more brilliant, much more ‘gifted’ than I was. I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle–while for myself I felt clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things I had to learn (so I was assured) things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end. Indeed, there was little about me that identified the kind of bright student who wins at prestigious competitions or assimilates almost by sleight of hand, the most forbidding subjects."
There are many other such mathematicians who aren't flashy. (I recall that Hilbert is a famous example.) So I wouldn't be discouraged by this. Environmental factors are probably far more important.
Of course, there is a top, though it's hard to tell who's furthest ahead when all options are above your own level. It's healthier for my mental sanity to recognize that great things can still be done by those not at the top than to try and suppose the top is nearer to me than I would like or suppose that the top doesn't exist. If you asked me who I thought was at the top of humans thus far, I'd respond with von Neumann. An excerpt from an interview linked at http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/03/differences-are-enormou...
Fermi and von Neumann overlapped. They collaborated on problems of Taylor instabilities and they wrote a report. When Fermi went back to Chicago after that work he called in his very close collaborator, namely Herbert Anderson, a young Ph.D. student at Columbia, a collaboration that began from Fermi's very first days at Columbia and lasted up until the very last moment. Herb was an experimental physicist. (If you want to know about Fermi in great detail, you would do well to interview Herbert Anderson.) But, at any rate, when Fermi got back he called in Herb Anderson to his office and he said, "You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me."
Look, I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you, but if you have difficulty with any programming concept, you must not be a supergenius. You're just an ordinary genius at best.
The sad truth is that there are some people for whom programming comes as naturally as thinking, with code formed as easily as thoughts; and if it takes an effort to understand any aspect of programming, you have just learned that you are not one of those people. Alas.
Interesting. How do we know that there is a top, and who is sitting on it?
I tried answering this question with the google search: "greatest 20th century mathematician". The top link was this (http://fabpedigree.com/james/mathmen.htm). Hilbert and Grothendieck were the highest 20th century mathematicians. (Mentions that Grothendieck is "widely considered the greatest mathematician of the 20th century".) von Neumann was a bit lower, #15.
But I personally don't understand the whole ranking thing. :) Math is in bad shape if you can order people this way. I know that in software, there are a few parts which deeply interest me; while I couldn't care less if the other parts happen to have some fancy virtuosos. (They're about as interesting to me as virtuosos of building houses out of toothpicks. Which no doubt requires great ingenuity, but it's not my interest.)
So if someone were to present me a list of top programmers... it's probably the case it's dominated by these toothpick-virtuoso analogues. And even if it magically weren't, the concept is weird, because the people active in my fields of interest all have their different, interesting perspectives. They're not clones of each other which differ only in a single rankable quality. It's more about actual ideas, rather than the managerial perspective which focuses on the human as carrying units of production.
(BTW, I can't tell how much Eliezer's joking in that quote, even though I've read his fiction. One can form code virtually "as easily as thoughts", but that's like forming verse as easily as thoughts. The question is, do you find their verse interesting?)
Haha, that's an understatement, I'm sure he was light years ahead of me as early as 10. It's just inspiring to know that one can struggle with some of the basics and rebound to do great things.
I always felt I was slower than the other kids, but later I realised I was attempting to structure and understand the information whereas they were just regurgitating it. Once I did understand the information I could apply it far better than the others in class, and extend my understanding into new areas. That's just one reason someone may be "slower".
I thought I was. There's only a few dozen people on the planet who should be insulted by being told that they're not as good at mathematics as Roger Freaking Penrose.
But as best as I can tell, they're considering each 1x1x1 space to be a node like a Rubix cube, and they want a list of all possible paths from the center node to the surface. I imagine that half of the question is making sure that the interviewee presses for details, because there's plenty of problems I see with the question right off the bat. If n is even, there's no single center node, so where does the algorithm start? Can the algorithm traverse diagonally by edges, or only by adjacent faces? Not to mention that there's an infinite number of possible paths for some values of n, assuming paths can cross themselves, for the same reason that there's an infinite number of paths from my front door to my car if I feel like walking in circles for a while.