Whodi

If you follow the links, this was asked to someone interviewing for a job on the Windows team who then posted it to an interview question aggregator, so it's likely that the actual phrasing of the question was lost.

But as best as I can tell, they're considering each 1x1x1 space to be a node like a Rubix cube, and they want a list of all possible paths from the center node to the surface. I imagine that half of the question is making sure that the interviewee presses for details, because there's plenty of problems I see with the question right off the bat. If n is even, there's no single center node, so where does the algorithm start? Can the algorithm traverse diagonally by edges, or only by adjacent faces? Not to mention that there's an infinite number of possible paths for some values of n, assuming paths can cross themselves, for the same reason that there's an infinite number of paths from my front door to my car if I feel like walking in circles for a while.

Great find. This is the most in-depth article I've read on this subject. I actually use this as an open-ended interview question at the game company where I work. The PlayStation 2 has a bunch of quirks with floating point numbers because it doesn't follow the IEEE standard - for example, floats don't become infinity when they overflow, they just get clamped to the maximum possible float. Now you can't use your FPU for the tens of thousands of floating point calculations that are happening per frame. Sure, your processor is faster, but it's fighting with one arm tied behind its back.

Exactly. The loudest voices and most effective negotiators are the ones who tend to rise to the top. The Suge Knight comparison is apt - someone with resources and intimidation skills, yet no talent pertinent to the meat of the industry, whether that's music production or tech. The game industry has it pretty bad, too, as far as promoting creatively bankrupt smooth talkers as soon as they've had the slightest brush with success. Try rewinding the clock a few years and pitching Minecraft to any of these guys, and they'd give you the game industry equivalent of Clive's rant, which I guess would be "Do you even play games? You have to have a narrative, an objective, a scruffy white male lead, and the ability to blow shit up. I don't even know what you're doing here, this isn't a game, it's a map editor. Nobody's gonna go for this shit." The solution is, of course, to scope your project like Notch did and release it yourself without listening to the cynics :)

Ouch. It's one thing to have your idea panned, but to say "nobody gives a shit about your team"? That's harsh.

It's an unfortunate fact about any creative industry that a person with clout can completely put the brakes on an promising idea just because it doesn't fit neatly into their worldview. This reminds me of the story when Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman pitched Bat out of Hell to CBS. Clive Davis, the executive, says "Do you know how to write a song? Do you know anything about writing? If you're going to write for records, it goes like this: A, B, C, B, C, C. I don't know what you're doing. You're doing A, D, F, G, B, D, C. You don't know how to write a song. Have you ever listened to pop music?"

Hurtful. But even though this guy was a pretty successful A&R person, he wasn't clairvoyant, as the album was a huge hit. It's unfortunate that it demoralized their team instead of serving as bulletin board motivation material.

This is why Unity3D is so much more of a pleasure to work with than Unreal. Playing a new animation on a skinned mesh really can be as simple as Animation.Crossfade(). With a little creative thinking, power and simplicity don't have to be playing tug-of-war, they can actually complement each other.

Haha, that's an understatement, I'm sure he was light years ahead of me as early as 10. It's just inspiring to know that one can struggle with some of the basics and rebound to do great things.

"Is it true that you were bad at math as a kid?" "I was unbelievably slow... I always got lost... I was at least twice as slow as anybody else. Eventually I would do very well. You see, if I could do it that way, I would get very high marks."

Speaking as someone who still struggles with math, and was generally the dumbest kid in the most advanced classes, it's a huge relief to hear that someone as brilliant as Penrose experienced the same difficulties.