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If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft (2002)

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Re: If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft (2002)

#41

Post by Retric »

crocowhile wrote: post #21
Retric wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He basically said those things in an interview once. So while he might not react that way when looking for a job it really just depends on how much he wanted the job.

What things? The manhole stuff? Do you have a link?

Yea the manhole stuff was on google video, I think it may have been:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3164300309410618119#

Or something linked from there.

PS: "Tuva or Bust"

Edit: Sorry, I am having trouble finding it. There are several interviews that video is based on but they don't show the whole video.

Re: If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft (2002)

#42

Post by DevX101 »

Of anyone I've read or seen (in person or from videos), Feynman has the best fundamental grasp of meta-knowledge. By meta-knowledge, for lack of a better term, I mean understanding what it means to know something.

mhartl has already posted this excellent video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM, where he explains what the word "why" means in scientific inquiry. When we answer a "why" question, we don't really explain a concept in its entirety. At best, we're able to remove a layer of skin off the onion, but no one has ever really reached the center. I suppose science at it's heart is really just the elucidation of intermediate cause and effect scenarios.

For the question "why did the ball fall?", "Jimmy dropped it" is a perfectly valid answer. So is "Jimmy's motor neurons passed an action potential threshold, causing the muscles in his wrist to contract". So is "the ball moved along the curvature of space caused by the earth".

How far do we go?

Re: If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft (2002)

#44

Post by VladRussian »

davidw wrote: post #18

Reminds me of the bit in Cryptonomicon where Lawrence Waterhouse takes an intelligence test for the navy: "They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to co…

unfortunately, there is some practical truth in this Navy evaluation - Lawrence would definitely failed (ie. wouldn't complete them on-time and according to SOP) most of the assignments in the Navy or military in general.

Re: If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft (2002)

#45

Post by cperciva »

Retric wrote: post #17
27182818284 wrote: post #3

This comes up every now and then on social websites and every time I completely disagree that it reads like Feynman or that Feynman would react that way.

He basically said those things in an interview once. So while he might not react that way when looking for a job it really just depends on how much he wanted the job.

it really just depends on how much he wanted the job

I disagree. Feynman was famous for speaking his mind regardless of the context (Bohr insisted on Feynman's presence at critical points during the Manhattan project for exactly this reason, in fact -- everybody else was too inhibited around Bohr to speak up).

Feynman might have kicked himself afterwards, but wanting a job wouldn't have prevented him from pointing out an interviewer's errors.

Re: If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft (2002)

#46

Post by miguelpais »

klochner wrote: post #31
ax0n wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a four hour long interview for a systems programming/administration position where plebeian admins were allowed to grill me for about 25% of the time, asking me to whiteboard viable algorithms for cute little problems they concocted. All of my solutions would have functioned flawlessly and would have met all of the stated requirements, but they didn't involve the same thought processes that the interviewers had…

I had a similar experience, asked to design a sudoku solver. Coming from an AI background, I coded up an algorithm for state-space search. They were expecting me to approach it as a person would, reasoning about how you rule out certain numbers (the constraint propagation), which is a second-order consideration for a game the size of sudoku. I felt pretty smug when Peter Norvig shortly thereafter put up a blog post t…

As far as I know Norvig's solver has constraint propagation (maybe it didn't have it in the first version though).

Re: If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft (2002)

#47

Post by klochner »

miguelpais wrote: post #46
klochner wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar experience, asked to design a sudoku solver. Coming from an AI background, I coded up an algorithm for state-space search. They were expecting me to approach it as a person would, reasoning about how you rule out certain numbers (the constraint propagation), which is a second-order consideration for a game the size of sudoku. I felt pretty smug when Peter Norvig shortly thereafter put up a blog post t…

As far as I know Norvig's solver has constraint propagation (maybe it didn't have it in the first version though).

Nothing really clever though - he only applies the two most basic sudoku strategies:

   If a square has only one possible value, eliminate it from the square's peers.
   If a unit has only one possible place for a value, then put the value there.
And then he notes that those simple strategies combined with search yields very reasonable run times.

Re: If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft (2002)

#48

Post by moonwalker »

mikedmiked wrote: post #35
davidw wrote: post #18

Reminds me of the bit in Cryptonomicon where Lawrence Waterhouse takes an intelligence test for the navy: "They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to co…

Similarly, though not as funny, from "The Legend of John Von Neumann" - http://stepanov.lk.net/mnemo/legende.html 'Then there is the famous fly puzzle. Two bicyclists start twenty miles apart and head toward each other, each going at a steady rate of 10 m.p.h. At the same time a fly that travels at a steady 15 m.p.h. starts from the front wheel of the southbound bicycle and flies to the front wheel of the northbound…

There is another "trick" solution : Let's denote a point when the fly turns around to be a step. Then just notice, from any one step the next, the fly travels exactly 1.5x the distance of any of the bicycles, since it goes 15mph versus the bicyclye's 10mph. This holds at each step, so is true of the total distance traveled as well. But alltogether, one bicycle will travel exactly half of the 20miles, so 10miles. So the fly will travel 15miles.

Re: If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft (2002)

#49

Post by eru »

mynameishere wrote: post #33
eru wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His name has become a kind of strawman.

A ficitonal interloculor to whom one attributes poor arguments in order to easily refute them?

No. My usage is perhaps a new use of the word, but it fits with the metaphor of a man of straw.

Is there another word already in existence, that describes what I wanted to say? "A ficitonal interloculor to whom one attributes one's own's arguments in order to make them sound more profound."

Re: If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft (2002)

#50

Post by miguelpais »

klochner wrote: post #47
miguelpais wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know Norvig's solver has constraint propagation (maybe it didn't have it in the first version though).

Nothing really clever though - he only applies the two most basic sudoku strategies: If a square has only one possible value, eliminate it from the square's peers. If a unit has only one possible place for a value, then put the value there. And then he notes that those simple strategies combined with search yields very reasonable run times.

It might not be that clever, but it is able to considerably reduce the running time of the algorithm (even if the speedup in a 9x9 puzzle is not perceived).

In fact, if you ask people not from a CS background to explain the steps they would take to solve a puzzle, they probably wouldn't be able to think of a DFS, but they would state that they should rule out from each cell the numbers already present in its respective column, line and block. And for a Sudoku solver I don't think you really need more constraint propagation than that.

Anyway, I think you approached the problem the right away, I just think that you were so close to succeed in that test and it wasn't something that difficult to add to your solution.

EDIT: wrote the above before your edit. It's still appropriate though.

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