Fantastic Contraption and Job Interviews

Paul R. Brown @ 2008-08-26T05:37:20Z

I like Fantastic Contraption because solving the puzzles requires a fundamental type of cleverness, intuition, and experimentalism.

contraption to roll a ball contraption to climb a shaft

Something like Fantastic Contraption — but not Fantastic Contraption because everyone and their dog has played it at this point — would make an interesting adjunct to the traditional battery of questions in engineering interviews. (Yes, I saw Last Starfighter once upon a time. No, not in the theater.) The usual questions about data structures, algorithms, tools/practices, and design do a reasonable job of filtering candidates, but it can be like chewing a mouthful of saltine crackers for the interviewers after the Nth time through. A game might make it a bit more fun for folks on both sides of the table.

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How would you boil the ocean?

Paul Brown @ 2006-04-07T17:19:00Z

Via Mike Champion, I've come to find out that there's a whole book full of think-outside-the-box interview questions called How Would You Move Mount Fuji?.

Here's one of my favorite such:

An infinite number of identical ball bearings are at rest and spaced out on an infinite, perfectly level frictionless surface. A single ball bearing, identical to the others, is rolled down a ramp onto the surface, and the ramp is removed. After some amount of time has elapsed, and without watching in the interim, how can you identify the ball bearing that was added?

After a little while, I'll put an answer in the comments.

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