Sieve of Erastothenes is often introduced alongside prime numbers in elementary school math class and it has a funny/memorable name - it's not that weird for someone to know it. It is weird to lie about having a practical use case for it since running it to the point of a cryptographically useful prime length is infeasible and it requires O(n) memory. It seems vanishingly unlikely that this type of question can provi…
Great point on the Sieve - knowing it off of the top of his head wasn't itself a red-handed indicator of cheating, but claiming that he'd used it in a B2B SaaS app was. Especially given that he wasn't able to explain how he'd allegedly used it. The candidates we're bringing into this screen typically have 1-3 prior positions on their resume, so the point here is to throw them some softballs that they should be able t…
What's particularly frustrating is that I've got some actual unsolved algorithms problems I want a solution to. One might think that since the LLMs are smart enough to re-solve problems from their training data in interviews, they could help - alas, they have been of no help so far.