Otherwise, my initial response would be a visit to Wikipedia where my eyes would promptly glaze over at the text talking about "binomial coefficients" and I'd decide your job advertisement was misleading and it probably isn't a good job anyway.
You would be right in deciding that. Over the years I've seen all these puzzle and math kids have the least productivity in delivering business software.
And besides if you spend say 30 minutes a day reading these interview puzzles online, you can game the system and get your way through. Without you even being tested on some basic skills required to win in the real world.
You may know all the algorithms from the book by heart. But what's the whole point if you don't how to use a couple of unix text processing utilities? Puzzle kids generally answer that by saying something like sed can be learn't by reading a manual.
If you can learn and work with sed by reading a manual on the job, then you can also learn and work with algorithms by reading manuals on the job too!
You would be right in deciding that. Over the years I've seen all these puzzle and math kids have the least productivity in delivering business software.
And besides if you spend say 30 minutes a day reading these interview puzzles online, you can game the system and get your way through. Without you even being tested on some basic skills required to win in the real world.
You may know all the algorithms from the book by heart. But what's the whole point if you don't how to use a couple of unix text processing utilities? Puzzle kids generally answer that by saying something like sed can be learn't by reading a manual.
If you can learn and work with sed by reading a manual on the job, then you can also learn and work with algorithms by reading manuals on the job too!