Two Interview Questions
June 21, 2016
I like to read a web site called Career Cup, both to enjoy solving some of the programming exercise given there and to find exercise for Programming Praxis. As I write this exercise, here are the two most recent exercises on Career Cup:
- Given a function
rand2
that returns 0 or 1 with equal probability, write a functionrand3
that returns 0, 1 or 2 with equal probability, using onlyrand2
as a source of random numbers. - Given a set of characters and a dictionary of words, find the shortest word in the dictionary that contains all of the characters in the set. In case of a tie, return all the words of the same (shortest) length.
Your task is to write the two programs described above. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.