The following questions are claimed to be Microsoft interview questions. They are collected from the internet.
1. 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 ?
2. 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.
3. 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. How about finding both numbers – the duplicate and the missing?
4. Write a routine to draw a circle (x ** 2 + y ** 2 = r ** 2) without making use of any floating point computations at all.
5. Given only putchar (no sprintf, itoa, etc.) write a routine putlong that prints out an unsigned long in decimal.
6. Give a one-line C expression to test whether a number is a power of 2.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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).
10. 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 =x
There is a logical, arithmetic and a datastructure soln to the above problem.
11. Reverse a linked list. (singly-linked, doubly-linked, … ) Can u reverse a singly linked list using only two pointers?
13. In an X's and 0's game (i.e. TIC TAC TOE) if you write a program for this give a fast way to generate the moves by the computer. I mean this should be the fastest 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.
14. 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 fundamentals on number representation.
15. Give a fast way to multiply a number by 7.
16. How would go about finding out where to find a book in a library. (You do not know how exactly the books are organized beforehand).
18. Tradeoff between time spent in testing a product and getting into the market first.
19. What to test for given that there isn't enough time to test everything you want to.
20. 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).
21. Delete an element from a doubly linked list (which kind? with a dummy header or without?)
22. Write a function to find the depth of a binary tree.
23. 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 chars deleted.
24. 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.
25. Reverse a linked list??? Question still remains …
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