[trhway]

>Unless you're interviewing Dijkstra, it's a ridiculous question to ask.

like many ridiculously looking interview questions, they are actually a filter. For this particular types of questions young people tend to quickly solve them. In 1987, in 9th grade, during one of the first computer classes, never before seeing or touching programming (previous years of school in a small town in USSR), I myself came up with Dijkstra algorithm in less than 10 minutes when we were assigned task of finding shortest path. I remember the teacher looking impressed :) These days i treat it more like a signal - if people asks such puzzles a lot then they either intentionally filtering or even don't understand that and seriously think it is important CS(cience).