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Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page

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Re: Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page

#61

Post by pmav »

Cieplak wrote: post #23
jonmwords wrote: post #4

Here's the interview I published with the creator! http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how-a-google-engineer-b...

RWW: So it took two months to do this? PD: It’s not a trivial problem. It’s tricky. I’m quite proud of the way I did it. I can’t talk about the way we actually implemented it. (laughs) I wonder how they implemented it so that it renders so efficiently.

I think listlife is a simple and efficient algorithm: http://dotat.at/prog/life/life.html

Some years ago I implementend something similiar in javascript: http://pmav.eu/stuff/javascript-game-of-life-v3.1.1/

The benchmark can be really slow in some steps.

Re: Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page

#62

Post by avbor »

eranation wrote: post #33
jonmwords wrote: post #4

Here's the interview I published with the creator! http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how-a-google-engineer-b...

> So I made a demo and started showing my co-workers what it was and realized that some of them had never seen the Game of Life before. So let me get this straight, there are Google software engineers, that passed all the 3 month interview process which some considered the toughest in the world, and they never have heard of conway's game of life. this makes me feel a little better about myself now.

I find it interesting that your metric of smart is whether or not someone has knowledge of the Game of Life.

Re: Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page

#64

Post by brown9-2 »

avbor wrote: post #62
eranation wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So I made a demo and started showing my co-workers what it was and realized that some of them had never seen the Game of Life before. So let me get this straight, there are Google software engineers, that passed all the 3 month interview process which some considered the toughest in the world, and they never have heard of conway's game of life. this makes me feel a little better about myself now.

I find it interesting that your metric of smart is whether or not someone has knowledge of the Game of Life.

The comment makes no mention of the word "smart", just that Google's interview process is long and hard.

Re: Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page

#65

Post by brown9-2 »

eranation wrote: post #33
jonmwords wrote: post #4

Here's the interview I published with the creator! http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how-a-google-engineer-b...

> So I made a demo and started showing my co-workers what it was and realized that some of them had never seen the Game of Life before. So let me get this straight, there are Google software engineers, that passed all the 3 month interview process which some considered the toughest in the world, and they never have heard of conway's game of life. this makes me feel a little better about myself now.

As a small counterpoint, when I interviewed at Google, one of the interviewers asked me how I might design an app to play the Game of Life, starting with simple cases and scaling up to boards with millions and millions of cells (so it was secretly about designing a distributed computation system, I think).

Re: Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page

#66

Post by minwcnt5 »

eranation wrote: post #33
jonmwords wrote: post #4

Here's the interview I published with the creator! http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how-a-google-engineer-b...

> So I made a demo and started showing my co-workers what it was and realized that some of them had never seen the Game of Life before. So let me get this straight, there are Google software engineers, that passed all the 3 month interview process which some considered the toughest in the world, and they never have heard of conway's game of life. this makes me feel a little better about myself now.

I would bet that 95% of Google SWEs have heard of the Game of Life, but you can be an exceptionally good software engineer without that knowledge. It's usually considered recreational mathematics, which is a small or non-existent part of most core university CS curriculums, and not everyone in the field explores such topics outside of their formal work or studies.

Also, their interview process is usually not 3 months. Most engineers have a 45-minute phone interview or two, followed by a day of onsite interviews lasting 4-5 hours.

Re: Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page

#67

Post by smackfu »

eranation wrote: post #33
jonmwords wrote: post #4

Here's the interview I published with the creator! http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how-a-google-engineer-b...

> So I made a demo and started showing my co-workers what it was and realized that some of them had never seen the Game of Life before. So let me get this straight, there are Google software engineers, that passed all the 3 month interview process which some considered the toughest in the world, and they never have heard of conway's game of life. this makes me feel a little better about myself now.

The only reason I've heard of it is that they had the Martin Gardner essay collections at my library growing up.

Re: Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page

#68

Post by gknoy »

morsch wrote: post #54
moreati wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very, very subtle. I had to adjust the angle of the screen

It might be worth recalibrating your screen. This page ff. is a good start: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/contrast.php

It might also be dependent on the angle at which one is viewing the LCD -- on my laptop at work, I often cannot distinguish some of the lighter shades, as I have the screen at a glare-reducing angle.

Re: Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page

#69

Post by jenius »

pdog wrote: post #50
jonmwords wrote: post #4

Here's the interview I published with the creator! http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how-a-google-engineer-b...

> I can’t talk about the way we actually implemented it. It's all there, right? In obfuscated, minimized, but still-readable JavaScript.

Found it and beautified is as much as I could. Really tough to read still: http://cl.ly/K74W
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