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Programming exam, what to expect? 
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Well I have a (estimated) 4 hour programming exam tomorrow afternoon with a the developers of a very well known MMO for a position abroad (US, Finland or China, not sure which)

Is there anything in particular that is likely to pop up that may be confusing? I have some of my reference books with me but I think aside from 3d transformations I can manage most tasks reasonably well.

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Thu Mar 18, 2010 11:21 pm
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Anyone?

Got a C++ one on friday and a c one over the weekend

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Tue Mar 23, 2010 2:15 am
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I've never had a programming exam :( only ever had coursework stuff to do.

I can't imagine what kind of stuff might be on there?

Maybe bug fixing small programmes? Or showing knowledge regarding various programming patterns?

Sorry, not much help I know.

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Tue Mar 23, 2010 7:43 am
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Is it a written exam or a practical exam?


Tue Mar 23, 2010 10:16 am
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I've only got a few uni written programming papers I can try and dig out, but I've a feeling I just have paper copies and not the PDFs, which means they'll be in Rugby. I'll have a look, though.

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Tue Mar 23, 2010 11:38 am
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forquare1 wrote:
Is it a written exam or a practical exam?


Thats the thing I have no idea, based on experience at another company where it was a series of questions and hand written/typed code but not compiled for an output

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Tue Mar 23, 2010 4:50 pm
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forquare1 wrote:
Is it a written exam or a practical exam?



Well I did the one that I wasn't interested in (Job was for a C developer in an area I have no experience and no idea what to expect)

Questions were fairly generic, one was to calculating how to get an output from an input value using + or *
e.g. 11111, 121 would be 1 + 11 * 11

Other was a complex one involving rotation and an algorithm for tiles and placement, really still have no idea how to do it, no point in submitting it as without both completed they won't accept my answers.

Having a look at Project Euler for some common problems to get stuff under my belt before friday
http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=about

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Wed Mar 24, 2010 12:58 am
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finlay666 wrote:
Having a look at Project Euler for some common problems to get stuff under my belt before friday
http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=about

Ooh! Thanks for the link! I'll be having a go at a few of those!

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Wed Mar 24, 2010 7:49 am
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Done the first one :D

Fairly easy when you think about it :D

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Wed Mar 24, 2010 10:29 am
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1, 2 & 6 are trivial. Must ... Resist ... Urge ... To ... Do ... More!

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Wed Mar 24, 2010 11:44 am
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EddArmitage wrote:
1, 2 & 6 are trivial. Must ... Resist ... Urge ... To ... Do ... More!

Yeah, 6 seems very easy :D

If you look at some of the solutions though they are even easier than they first look :D

5 is also very easy.

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Wed Mar 24, 2010 11:54 am
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For Problem1 I did the following:

Code:
//If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.
//
//Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.

#include <stdio.h>

int sumOfMultiple( int max, int multiple ) {
   int sum = 0;
   int i = 0;
   
   for( i = 0; i < max; i += multiple ) {
      sum += i;
   }
   
   return sum;
}

int main( int argc, char* argv[] ) {
   int threes      = sumOfMultiple(1000, 3);
   int fives      = sumOfMultiple(1000, 5);
   int fifteens   = sumOfMultiple(1000, 15);
   int sum         = threes + fives - fifteens;

   printf("Sum of threes: %d\n", threes);
   printf("Sum of fives: %d\n", fives);
   printf("Total sum: %d\n", sum);
}

Now I'm trying to decide if splitting it into three smaller loops was more efficient than one large loop. Obviously I'll have fewer total iterations (for most, if not all, cases), but would this offer greater performance over the alternative big-loop-simple-computation approach:

Code:
for( i = 0; i < max; i++) {
    if( i % 3 == 0 || i % 5 == 0 ) {
        sum += i;
    }
}


Why I'm worrying about such things that was hacked together so quickly, I don't know!

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Wed Mar 24, 2010 12:11 pm
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Fogmeister wrote:
Done the first one :D

Fairly easy when you think about it :D


try problem 282 (Ackermann) WITHOUT getting a stack overflow ;)

Edd.... really?

Code:
int score = 0;
for(int i = 0; i<=1000; i++)
{
        if(i%3 ==0 || i%5==0)
        {
            score+=i;
            Console.WriteLine(i);
        }
}
Console.WriteLine("Total is {0}", score);


Iterative mod is your friend in that one like you did 2nd ;) It should be quicker as the if statement should factor quickly

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Wed Mar 24, 2010 12:52 pm
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finlay666 wrote:
Edd.... really?

That was my second suggestion. (8-p)

Inititally I was trying to avoid iterating over the whole array, and wondered whether the saving there was worth the extra crap.

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Wed Mar 24, 2010 12:55 pm
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finlay666 wrote:
Fogmeister wrote:
Done the first one :D

Fairly easy when you think about it :D


try problem 282 (Ackermann) WITHOUT getting a stack overflow ;)

Edd.... really?

Code:
int score = 0;
for(int i = 0; i<=1000; i++)
{
        if(i%3 ==0 || i%5==0)
        {
            score+=i;
            Console.WriteLine(i);
        }
}
Console.WriteLine("Total is {0}", score);


Iterative mod is your friend in that one like you did 2nd ;) It should be quicker as the if statement should factor quickly

ROFL, I thought I'd write out the A(2,2) on paper to work out how it flows to begin with. I gave up after a page of workings :D

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Wed Mar 24, 2010 1:43 pm
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