| Here is a story about a problem in applying this approach more broadly. A local tech recruiting company asked our Python user group to try out their new "fun" programming challenge used to evaluate and rank candidates. We had an hour. I didn't like the problem, so ended up helping and chatting with others in the user group. Then after 45 minutes I realized there was a game theoretical best solution easily implemented using recursion and memoization. While I was able to implement it in time, it did not win. Further analysis later showed that the game play was too short to rank any strategy reasonably. More specifically, the winner was strongly based on player order, not strategy. In other words, the tech recruiting company's new evaluation tool was total bunkum. I wrote it up and let them know. I don't know what they did with that product. In any case, it took me more than 35 minutes to solve. |