You’ve got someone working for you for seven days and a gold bar to pay them. You must pay the worker for their work at the end of every day. If you are only allowed to make two breaks in the gold bar, how do you pay your worker? (Assuming equal amount of work is done during each day thus requiring equal amount of pay for each day)
Just in the morning when the questions were shown to the YIT team, we were bit worried whether if anyone will get this right within the given time. That will make the whole program a flop. I told myself that if no one in the forum can solve this we are trying to create the Silicon Valley at the wrong place.
Then team decided that we will have some hints ready in case of plan B. But at the event we never needed to any of the hints and for all the 3 questions we had multiple people coming up with answers within a few minutes. I had asked similar questions at many interviews and I had never got answers for the same questions so quickly. It was an awesome feeling and it gave a lot of belief that we are doing the right thing at the right place. That is to try to make "Jaffna the next Silicon Valley".
The next item was for the experts to do a panel discussion. Will write about that in my tomorrow's post.
We can take anything away from people of Jaffna .. not their mathematical skills.
ReplyDeleteWhat's the answer man. I'm stumped. Take it to SEW Gunasekera, get some cash?
ReplyDeleteYou should think in the lines of a transaction!
Delete@sayanthan .. I think there is a fundamental flaw in this question though .. how would you accept your employee to bring the gold back anyway? isn't he supposed to spend it?
ReplyDeleteJK - Morally it could be unfair to ask the employee to bring the gold without spending it, however employer can demand to bring it back if the employee wants the rest of his pay!
DeleteVeena ... Technically the employee is not getting paid first day if he is gonna work for the second day! That doesn't make any sense .. but then that's how it is!
DeleteThank god a JK wasn't there at the event. Or at least even if he was there he wasn't vocal ;)
DeleteSayanthan we use solve these questions when we were at grade 5 or even earlier. However, I am glad that the formal education is unable take this quality out.
ReplyDeleteUthaya, true. Its a cultural thing in Jaffna to be trying such puzzles at an early age and that's the very reason I believe we can do well in algorithm design and stuff.
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