What? "Implement as much of Minesweeper as you can in an hour?" If you're going to build something--evens something as simple as Minesweeper, you're still going to need time to plan it out, diagram it, decide which modules call into which other ones, decide on the data structures, etc. Diving right into writing code so you can get _something_ done in an hour is probably the worst strategy if your goal is to do it right.
I'd rather work with the person who would approach that by taking 3 hours to plan, 3 hours to code, and 2 hours to bug fix, rather than the "Ready, Fire, Aim" person who took 1 hour to code, 4 hours to fix what he did, 8 more hours to find his design was totally wrong and re-do major portions of it, 8 more fixing the bugs in that version........
Unless you plan to filter out the people who just jumped into the code, in which the exercise is just a trick question.
I'd rather work with the person who would approach that by taking 3 hours to plan, 3 hours to code, and 2 hours to bug fix, rather than the "Ready, Fire, Aim" person who took 1 hour to code, 4 hours to fix what he did, 8 more hours to find his design was totally wrong and re-do major portions of it, 8 more fixing the bugs in that version........
Unless you plan to filter out the people who just jumped into the code, in which the exercise is just a trick question.