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Indeed, I'd agree with both of you in that I can do a large number of other tasks off the top of my head, but not Tic-Tac-Toe, even though given a fair bit of time to do that "coercing", it's not extremely difficult. However, I'd also agree with kasey_junk's position that this type of problem doesn't quite measure what they think it does, and the "ease" of the problem is really irrelevant. What we should be looking at is the efficacy of the test: does it measure what we think it measures? Does it successfully differentiate between good and bad candidates? Gonna kinda ramble off here for a second... I have an intern at my day job now, and we're working through a task I've done a million times. I know how I'd do it, and I could finish the whole thing in about an hour, but I want him to go through all the steps on his own. He's been working on it for over a week, and today he came up with a bunch of possible solutions to a particular obstacle, and he said, "Which one is the right one to do?" And honestly, the answer is that there isn't one right way to go. All of those solutions will work, and at various times in the past, I've tried them all. What I'm getting at is that I think OP is correct that getting the "right" answer isn't super important. To take another rather poor analogy, look at Google Maps. If I type in "642 Harrison St, San Francisco, CA", then it drops me at a particular point on the map that just so happens to be an office building. There is no 644 Harrison St, but if I type it into Google, they drop a pin right next to the building, anyway. The interesting thing about this is that Google doesn't care exactly where the building is. Instead, they want to get me close enough to my destination that I can eyeball it and figure out the rest myself. To put that another way, the "right" answer would be "there's no building here," but Google correctly identifies the problem as "how do I get to this physical spot?" and not "is this a real place?" Likewise, in a lot of areas of life, not just programming and maps, getting the "right" answer isn't necessarily the only answer. For most things, if you get within a certain range, with a certain margin of error, then that's good enough. If you ask for a medium-rare steak and it comes out medium, it's still gonna taste good, just not perfect. If you run a marathon but wind up walking for 2 minutes in the middle of it, you still covered the distance, even though you technically only ran 98%. If you have a meeting at 3:00 and you arrive at 3:02 or 2:58, it's gonna be fine. For most things, there's a certain amount of "close enough" that is acceptable. Does it really matter if 644 Harrison St exists or not? Of course not. Google gets me to that location, and I am able to do the rest from there. Does it really matter if your ASCII spiral is perfect? No, but as long as you demonstrate your mastery of arrays and for-loops and basic algebra, you should pass the test. At least, that's my two cents. |