Slashdot Mirror
Google's Math Puzzle
An anonymous reader writes "Commuters in Cambridge, Mass., are scratching their heads over signs challenging passers-by to solve a complicated math problem. The mysterious banners are actually a job-recruiting pitch from Google."
if it would be acceptable to hack a whois database to see what domains are registered to google.com and just go there without solving the math problem. In fact, maybe they'd prefer that way, since Google has nothing to do with prime numbers but everything to do with the Internet.
... in the mathematical sense? It strikes me that it probably isn't, since the decimal expansion of e is base dependent, and most "interesting" properties of number are not, IMHO, dependent on the number of fingers our forefathers used for counting.
Is there any method for the solution besides a brute force search and an efficient algorithm for primality testing?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Remember kids, you don't have to KNOW anything any more. This is the age of the search engine.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
In the latest issue Dr. Dobbs (you get a free subscription if you attend LinuxWorldConf), they had a pullout job application. It was in the style of an SAT test and was filled with such "oh we're so smart and clever and funny and funky funky fresh" questions such as "write a haiku on database caching" and "the box below is empty. fill it with something" and other questions where any of the questions could be considered correct.
It was really annoying. It didn't make me want to work there at all. It was like a "oh we're so smart mensa+masturbating club".
Presumably they are looking for geeks to apply. They put that out there and it gets posted to Slashdot (which they probably expected) and gets deciphered in less than 20 minutes or so (which they also probably expected) and inevitably results in lots of geeks pondering applying to Google.
Sounds reasonable and gets them good exposure at the same time. There is a reason why Google is a household name. This is one more example.
Nice idea, except if you've only seen the billboard, how do you know it has anything to do with Google?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I used an even more twisted form of efficiency, I used parallel research, I looked for the answer on Slashdot. Took very little effort on my part, and got me the correct answer on the back of others.
I guess I must be perfect CEO material.
A Skoda is for life, not for casual humour.
Though there's no need to go churning through millions of digits. The density of primes among intergers is roughly 1/ln(n), so one in every 40-odd 10-digit numbers is prime. And indeed, the prime in question appears at about the 100th digit. Not that far in.
So the strategy of searching the digits of e is pretty quick. Even without knowing much perl and having to look things up a lot, I did it in a matter of minutes.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
You don't need to know that. Here's how I solved it when I first heard about it in July.
1. Sue IBM
2. Sell Stock
3. Profit!
Nuthin to it, and Daryl has executed step 2 very brilliantly.
It's also clear that during the interview process, they're gonna ask people how they found the answer. If you can detail your calculations or reasoning, you're in; if you say "I Googled the question and found the answer...", they'll say "Well, thanks for the flattery, but get the hell out"
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
I think you're missing the point, which is:
increase the hype by veiling it as an elite problem...
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Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
Then there are people who are great software designers and implementors who have little ability to solve complex/obsure math problems. Google is throwing all those people away.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
I think you, and the thread stretching out from your post, are missing the point. The point is not the with polynomial interpolation, gowen can get "the answer". His point is that you can reasonably get any answer.
The set of functions is uncountably infinite. There are uncountably infinite functions that have f of 1, 2, 3, and 4 set to the values Google gave. The reality is that mathematically speaking, giving four numbers results in exactly no constraint on the next number; you might as well just pick one at random. "Polynomial interpolation" is one reasonable path to this, but remember that functions need not even be continuous and are ultimately just infinite look-up tables. (Note the final "solution" is just a lookup table-type function.)
To counter the obvious next objection ("well obviously it is going to be a human-meaningful number"), I take my objection one meta. Obviously we're not truly drawing from that infinite set of functions. However, there's still an effectively infinite set of "human meaningful functions", too. So the true challenge becomes not a math problem, but in sheer guessing which exact constraints the puzzle writer chose.
This is not a mathematical problem. It tries to pretend to be one, but it is not. Generally, once you know the constraints the solution is trivial.
The correct mathematical answer to all such sequences remains "The next number is whatever the hell it feels like being". I have better things to do with my time then try to second-guess somebody pretending to be clever and plucking some random thing out of the uncountably infinite set and demanding that I guess it. Thus, I don't do these puzzles; they're sophmoric in the literal sense of the term, created by people who think they are clever but don't seem to have a deep understanding of math.
People who "solve" the puzzle may impress Google, but I am not impressed by Google using this as a puzzle.