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$1000 coding challenge from E la Carte (YC S10)

elacarte.com

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Re: $1000 coding challenge from E la Carte (YC S10)

#21

Post by rajatsuri »

georgemcbay wrote: post #17

Don't factor time into the rankings unless you mean overall time from start of the challenge until 3 valid answers are entered (and even that is broken since it favors people who have heard about the challenge sooner). There's nothing stopping anyone who really cares from getting the entire challenge ahead of time and then doing their pre-worked-out for-reals answer entries from a new IP address.

not to worry, we're aware of how people might try to cheat... it's not fully automated, we have our engineers judging this as well

Re: $1000 coding challenge from E la Carte (YC S10)

#22

Post by [deleted] »

anonymoushn wrote: post #15

For #2, are the codes unique? Do customers select dishes uniformly at random, without regard to whether they appear to be available? How could an item possibly appear to be unavailable when in fact it is available? The problem statement makes it seem that the grid presented to the customer is an array of 36 squares, where every square that corresponds to a letter or number that occurs in any index of any possible spe…

[deleted]

Re: $1000 coding challenge from E la Carte (YC S10)

#23

Post by anonymoushn »

rajatsuri wrote: post #20
anonymoushn wrote: post #15

For #2, are the codes unique? Do customers select dishes uniformly at random, without regard to whether they appear to be available? How could an item possibly appear to be unavailable when in fact it is available? The problem statement makes it seem that the grid presented to the customer is an array of 36 squares, where every square that corresponds to a letter or number that occurs in any index of any possible spe…

the first part of q2 assumes that the customer has already picked items that appear to be available

I tried solving the version the problem in which the codes are not necessarily unique, the grid is 1x36, only any character that appears in the code of any item that is a special today is marked, an item "appears to be available" iff all of the characters in its code are marked, and the customer chooses from the items that appear to be available for the first question.

It seems that this is not the correct interpretation of the problem statement.

Re: $1000 coding challenge from E la Carte (YC S10)

#24

Post by [deleted] »

anonymoushn wrote: post #15

For #2, are the codes unique? Do customers select dishes uniformly at random, without regard to whether they appear to be available? How could an item possibly appear to be unavailable when in fact it is available? The problem statement makes it seem that the grid presented to the customer is an array of 36 squares, where every square that corresponds to a letter or number that occurs in any index of any possible spe…

[deleted]

Re: $1000 coding challenge from E la Carte (YC S10)

#25

Post by mathgladiator »

rajatsuri wrote: post #21
georgemcbay wrote: post #17

Don't factor time into the rankings unless you mean overall time from start of the challenge until 3 valid answers are entered (and even that is broken since it favors people who have heard about the challenge sooner). There's nothing stopping anyone who really cares from getting the entire challenge ahead of time and then doing their pre-worked-out for-reals answer entries from a new IP address.

not to worry, we're aware of how people might try to cheat... it's not fully automated, we have our engineers judging this as well

me thinks you are solving the wrong problem

Re: $1000 coding challenge from E la Carte (YC S10)

#26

Post by anonymoushn »

anonymoushn wrote: post #23
rajatsuri wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the first part of q2 assumes that the customer has already picked items that appear to be available

I tried solving the version the problem in which the codes are not necessarily unique, the grid is 1x36, only any character that appears in the code of any item that is a special today is marked, an item "appears to be available" iff all of the characters in its code are marked, and the customer chooses from the items that appear to be available for the first question. It seems that this is not the correct interpreta…

The version of the problem in which all of the above is true except that the codes must be unique also appears to be the wrong interpretation of the problem statement. I'm sort of inclined to do something else with my time, since this seems to be more of a mind-reading challenge than a programming challenge.

Re: $1000 coding challenge from E la Carte (YC S10)

#28

Post by thedufer »

The second problem is not well-defined, so how long it takes has considerably more to do with how many possible interpretations you have to try before you get it right and how long it takes you to grok the grid scheme than how long it actually takes you to solve problems of that nature. You may want to consider rewriting it. As it is, I've lost any interest I initially had in your company as a whole. You need to stand out to applicants as much as they need to stand out to you, and this is doing exactly the opposite.

Re: $1000 coding challenge from E la Carte (YC S10)

#29

Post by o1iver »

thedufer wrote: post #28

The second problem is not well-defined, so how long it takes has considerably more to do with how many possible interpretations you have to try before you get it right and how long it takes you to grok the grid scheme than how long it actually takes you to solve problems of that nature. You may want to consider rewriting it. As it is, I've lost any interest I initially had in your company as a whole. You need to stan…

Please elaborate... I don't understand the criticism. I find the question quite interesting. What is ambiguous about it?
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