FaceBook Career Puzzles
Facebook career puzzles is a collection of algorithmic fun problems. You can solve it using a variety of programming languages.
The rule is simple: you email your solution to the puzzle bot and it'll run your code and mail you back the result. If you pass all the test cases in the time/space constraint, you get a "congrats" reply telling you the time spent for running the longest test case. If you get it wrong, the bot just tells you failed but no details as to what/how/why (you dunno know it's timeout or wrong answer, etc.). And to prevent spamming the bot as a debug tool, the bot only replies every 4 hours.
The problems are of different hardness levels. In fact, except some thrift problems, all are classic algorithm problems. Without disclosing too much to spoil the fun, i list some of 'em (but not to say which to which):
- Dynamic Programming (that's a fave for many contests; for several problems)
- Max clique
- Stable Marriage
- TSP (you know it, classic. sometime an augmented TSP)
- Kd-tree knn
This is an unofficial FAQ you can refer to for more hints.
As of this writing, I solved all those 'classic' problems except some thrift problems. The thrift problems are really fun. They are a new style of interactive (dynamic) problems. Just that I have some problems (you know it) to connect to the thrift server.
Those from ACM/ICPC background may find it annoying that there are no clear specification for input limit/range. I just give you a hint: If it's a NP-hard problem, the input could not be too big (in fact, it actually often is very small).
