Hacker News Reader

Comment by chipsy | Hacker News Reader

Lookup table.

Edit: I should add, the problem never said I didn't have infinite memory or computational resources.

This should be exactly the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that these questions find. But something tells me the person who asked this question would not have been impressed, which is sad. They probably just want someone who memorized a division implementation in assembly.

Assuming unspecified resources are infinite without confirming? This is not good problem solving. You should not be impressed.

That's how brain-teaser questions usually stump me - because I impose some limitation that doesn't exist. The question had pretty specific limitations, but the amount of resources wasn't one of them. To me the answer is valid. If the interviewer wanted to see an implementation of a division function they could have just said "please implement a division function"

Ok, but how do you create the lookup table?

Mechanical Turk. A budget limit wasn't mentioned either :)

I don't know, but how do you compile any of these C programs?

  for i... {
    append i
    append i + 0.333
    append i + 0.666
  }

You can't use the + operator.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com