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Discussion on: Interview Question: A two-player card game

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matpk profile image
Matheus Adorni Dardenne

I'll definitely try to code it today to see if I can manage to do it in less than 45 minutes. Thanks for writing!

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mortoray profile image
edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

Let us know how you do.

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matpk profile image
Matheus Adorni Dardenne

I'm fairly disappointed with myself. Whilst it took me only 30 minutes to code the "core" solution, to code all functionalities I took almost two hours.

I was particularly stuck at how to determine a tie between multiple players... my final solution was not exactly "elegant" either, I used a bubble sort algorithm to order the players by score, so I would have a "ranking", then I compare their scores pushing them to a "winners" array until they aren't equal anymore.

I guess I would fail your interview.

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mortoray profile image
edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

By "core" solution you mean the 2-player version, and you got a bit stuck on the N-player parts?

Keep in mind that that in the interview I don't let people get stuck. When I see obvious struggles I'll give tips, or possible solutions. As long as it isn't excessive I don't count this against the people in the feedback. It's just a way to move it along and ensure I'm not evaluating people based on one block.

Things like sorting lists, and picking max/min, does some up a lot during interviews though, even the classic algorithm ones. It's also something that comes up quite often in day-to-day coding I find.

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matpk profile image
Matheus Adorni Dardenne

Not exactly. I built it already thinking it could be scalable to n players, I got stuck literally on the last function, the one that would display the winner, because I got carried away trying solutions to ties, but I guess I would be able to nail it in the 15 minutes I had left if you gave me a hint :P