Posted on 08/05/2011 10:53:16 AM PDT by Slings and Arrows
Nobody has to tell you that it’s a rough job market. So when you do finagle a job interview, you’ll want to shine.
-snip-
Procter & Gamble: Sell me an invisible pen.
Facebook: Twenty five racehorses, no stopwatch, five tracks. Figure out the top three fastest horses in the fewest number of races.
Citigroup: What is your strategy at table tennis?
Google: You are climbing a staircase. Each time you can either take one step or two. The staircase has n steps. In how many distinct ways can you climb the staircase?
Capital One: How do you evaluate Subway’s five-foot long sub policy?
Gryphon Scientific: How many cocktail umbrellas are there in a given time in the United States?
Enterprise Rent-A-Car: Would you be okay hearing “no” from seven out of 10 customers.
Goldman Sachs: Suppose you had eight identical balls. One of them is slightly heavier and you are given a balance scale. What’s the fewest number of times you have to use the scale to find the heavier ball?
Towers Watson: Estimate how many planes are there in the sky.
Lubin Lawrence: If you could describe Hershey, Godiva and Dove chocolate as people, how would you describe them?
Pottery Barn: If I was a genie and could give you your dream job, what and where would it be?
Kiewit Corp.: What did you play with as a child?
VWR International: How would you market a telescope in 1750 when no one knows about orbits, moons etc.
Diageo North America: If you walk into a liquor store to count the unsold bottles, but the clerk is screaming at you to leave, what do you do?
Brown & Brown Insurance: How would you rate your life on a scale of 1 to 10?
(Excerpt) Read more at moneywatch.bnet.com ...
Agreed.
You got it!
Pssst. Don’t tell anybody. They ignored me. Like constipated mathemeticians having to work it out with a pencil.
In other words, people don’t know how to properly interview so they get cute about it.
Correction. It took 48 posts. But that’s okay. I can handle the rejection. LOL
The inconsistency is in this: "Suppose you had eight identical balls. One of them is slightly heavier."
The balls aren't identical if one is heavier. Moreover, just how much heavier is the one ball? Is it detectable by the provided scale?
Therefore I would "cheat". As you suggested, on way is to not to use the provided scale. There are other ways. Social engineering always works.
Idiot savant problems like this one are always such fun to solve using social engineering!
By weighing all of the balls at once, you’re limiting your scale to providing only binary information, ie one side is heavier. If you pull an exclusionary group you can increase the information the scale gives you from a binary result of left side heavier or right side heavier to three, left side heavier, right side heavier or the new result of balanced. This 50% increase in information would mean that you could do it in two rather than three.
Weigh 3 and 3 with an exclusionary group of 2. The result of your initial weigh will either eliminate 5 balls or 6 balls, leaving 2 or three. If 2 are left, weigh them against each other and get the result. If 3 balls are left, again pull an exclusionary group (of one) and utilize the scales potential to provide 3 answers rather than two and get result.
After I ate it, there were none.
but what if the three fastest were actually c, d, and e?
Yes, I did misread it. My bad. Still, if negative numbers are allowed, then there is no correct answer. If I was asked that question in a job interview, I would write out some code and tell the interviewer that while I didn’t know the answer to the question, a computer running that code would.
Bah, with that question, Sachs isn’t looking for a social engineering answer. They’re looking for the guy who groks the information potential of the scale. Just like the scale itself, Sachs is using the question to create three groups: The clueless who don’t have any idea how to proceed, the bright who understand how the scale can be used as a binary device to bubble sort the answer in three steps, and finally the applicant who understands how to maximize the scales potential information to shorten it to two steps.
Dodgy answers like “How can they be identical?” or “Can the scale detect the difference in weight?” are just going to place you firmly in the first group.
Which is why Sachs is driving us to destruction ...
"Spock, which ball is the heaviest?"
If you’re from NY, CA, IL, or MA: Never.
We made a trebuche with telephone poles.....it throws Honda’s !
How can you find the one heavier ball with one weighing?
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