Today I met an interesting gentleman in the bus on my way to the Microsoft company meeting. What should have been a 25 minute ride, took 2 nearly 2 hours. This person was sitting next to me and he had a notebook and there were a few numbers and alphabets written on it and he was thinking deeply. I had a sneaking suspicion that it might be a puzzle he was trying to solve and it was confirmed once we started talking. He then asked me if I like puzzles and I pretended like I did and he explained it to me. It was one of the classical interview puzzles about 4 people needing to cross a bridge, having only one torch light, while only two can go across at any given time and we had to figure out the shortest time in which the 4 can cross the bridge give the time that each person would take.
He said he found the obvious way to do it and it was 19 minutes, but he was very sure that that was not the right answer. He asked me if I can solve it. I vaguely remembered it from the time I was preparing for Microsoft interviews and then figured out the method and told him the shortest time was 17 minutes. He was thrilled and said that he can now enjoy the ride peacefully.
Oh well, I forgot to mention that during our conversation, he mentioned that he is currently working as an Architect on the CLR team and he had an undergraduate degree from MIT and a PhD from Carnegie Melon. I guess I made a great decision by not applying to MIT or pursuing a PhD :)
1 comment:
the end is not as sweet as the process
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