Submitted by bookman on Wed, 10/28/2009 - 00:09
Computer Science
- Given a rectangular (cuboidal for the puritans) cake with a rectangular
piece removed (any size or orientation), how would you cut the remainder
of the cake into two equal halves with one straight cut of a knife ?
- You're given an array containing both positive and negative integers and
required to find the subarray with the largest sum (O(N) a la KBL).
Write a routine in C for the above.
- Given an array of size N in which every number is between 1 and N,
determine if there are any duplicates in it. You are allowed to destroy
the array if you like. [ I ended up giving about 4 or 5 different solutions
for this, each supposedly better than the others ].
- Write a routine to draw a circle (x ** 2 + y ** 2 = r ** 2) without making
use of any floating point computations at all. [ This one had me stuck for
quite some time and I first gave a solution that did have floating point
computations ].
- Given only putchar (no sprintf, itoa, etc.) write a routine putlong that
prints out an unsigned long in decimal. [ I gave the obvious solution of
taking % 10 and / 10, which gives us the decimal value in reverse order.
This requires an array since we need to print it out in the correct order.
The interviewer wasn't too pleased and asked me to give a solution which
didn't need the array ].
- Give a one-line C expression to test whether a number is a power of
2. [No loops allowed - it's a simple test.]
- Given an array of characters which form a sentence of words, give an
efficient algorithm to reverse the order of the words (not characters)
in it.
- How many points are there on the globe where by walking one mile south,
one mile east and one mile north you reach the place where you started.
- Give a very good method to count the number of ones in a 32 bit number.
(caution: looping through testing each bit is not a solution).
- What are the different ways to say, the value of x can be either a 0
or a 1. Apparently the if then else solution has a jump when written
out in assembly.
if (x == 0)
y=0
else
y =xThere is a logical, arithmetic and a datastructure soln to the above
problem.
- Reverse a linked list.
- Insert in a sorted list
- In a X's and 0's game (i.e. TIC TAC TOE) if you write a program for
this give a gast way to generate the moves by the computer. I mean this
should be the fasteset way possible. The answer is that you need to store
all possible configurations of the board and the move that is associated
with that. Then it boils down to just accessing the right element and
getting the corresponding move for it. Do some analysis and do some more
optimization in storage since otherwise it becomes infeasible to get
the required storage in a DOS machine.
- I was given two lines of assembly code which found the absolute value
of a number stored in two's complement form. I had to recognize what the
code was doing. Pretty simple if you know some assembly and some fundaes
on number representation.
- Give a fast way to multiply a number by 7.
- How would go about finding out where to find a book in a library. (You
don't know how exactly the books are organized beforehand). - Linked list manipulation.
- What to test for given that there isn't enough time to test everything
you want to.
- First some definitions for this problem:
a) An ASCII character is one byte long and the most significant bit
in the byte is always '0'.
b) A Kanji character is two bytes long. The only characteristic of a
Kanji character is that in its first byte the most significant bit
is '1'.Now you are given an array of a characters (both ASCII and Kanji) and,
an index into the array. The index points to the start of some character.
Now you need to write a function to do a backspace (i.e. delete the
character before the given index).
- Delete an element from a doubly linked list.
- Write a function to find the depth of a binary tree.
- Given two strings S1 and S2. Delete from S2 all those characters which
occur in S1 also and finally create a clean S2 with the relevant characters
deleted.
- Assuming that locks are the only reason due to which deadlocks can occur
in a system. What would be a foolproof method of avoiding deadlocks in
the system.
- Write a routine that prints out a 2-D array in spiral order!
- How is the readers-writers problem solved? - using semaphores/ada .. etc.
- Ways of optimizing symbol table storage in compilers.
- A walk-through through the symbol table functions, lookup() implementation
etc - The interv. was on the Microsoft C team. - There are 3 ants at 3 corners of a triangle, they randomly start moving
towards another corner.. what is the probability that they don't collide.
- Write an efficient algo and C code to shuffle a pack of cards.. this one
was a feedback process until we came up with one with no extra storage. - Given an array of characters. How would you reverse it. ?
How would you reverse it without using indexing in the array.
- Give a good data structure for having n queues ( n not fixed) in a
finite memory segment. You can have some data-structure separate for
each queue. Try to use at least 90% of the memory space. - Write, efficient code for extracting unique elements from
a sorted list of array. e.g. (1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 5, 5, 5, 9, 9, 9, 9) ->
(1, 3, 5, 9).
- Given a list of numbers ( fixed list) Now given any other list,
how can you efficiently find out if there is any element in the
second list that is an element of the first list (fixed list). - given a linked list with the following property
node2 is left child of node1, if node2 < node1
els, it is the right child.O P
|
|
O A
|
|
O B
|
|
O CHow do you convert the above linked list to the
form without disturbing the property. Write C code
for that.O P
|
|
O B
/
/
/
O ? O ?determine where do A and C go
- Describe the file system layout in the UNIX OS
a) describe boot block, super block, inodes and data layout - In UNIX, are the files allocated contiguous blocks of data
a) no, they might be fragmented
how is the fragmented data kept track of
a) describe the direct blocks and indirect blocks in UNIX
file system
- Write an efficient C code for 'tr' program. 'tr' has two command
line arguments. They both are strings of same length. tr reads an
input file, replaces each character in the first string with the
corresponding character in the second string. eg. 'tr abc xyz'
replaces all 'a's by 'x's, 'b's by 'y's and so on.
a) have an array of length 26.
put 'x' in array element corr to 'a'
put 'y' in array element corr to 'b'
put 'z' in array element corr to 'c'
put 'd' in array element corr to 'd'
put 'e' in array element corr to 'e'
and so on.the code
while (!eof)
{
c = getc();
putc(array[c - 'a']);
}
- given a new disk, how do you determine which interleaving is the best
a) give 1000 read operations with each kind of interleaving
determine the best interleaving from the statistics
- You are presented with a linked list, which may have a "loop" in it. That is, an element of the linked list may
incorrectly point to a previously encountered element, which can cause an infinite loop when traversing the list.
Devise an algorithm to detect whether a loop exists in a linked list. How does your answer change if you cannot
change the structure of the list elements? - Given a Process A that collects user inputs through a GUI and passes input parameters to Process B on another
machine which in turn records the data to a data base. As a system designer, what considerations would you take
into account? What technologies would you employ? - What is the difference between the HEAP and the STACK? Where in memory are these located relative to the
executing program? - Explain is TRY and CATCH exception handling in C++. Why is this type of exception handling useful?
Tags in Tags
Cardiovascular System
Computer Science
Database Books
DERMATOLOGY
DIGESTIVE DISEASES
GENARAL MEDICINE
General
GENETICS
GYNECOLOGY AND OBSTETRICS
Hardware Books
HIV AIDS
INFECTIOUS DISEASES
Java Books
Languages
Math Books
Medical Books
Microsoft Books
Networking
NEUROSCIENCE
NUTRITION
ONCOLOGY
Operating Systems
OPHTHALMOLOGY
Other Books
PEDIATRICS
PHARMACOLOGY
RADIOLOGY
Software Engineering
UROLOGY
Web Services and web Development
Follow us on Twitter