Interview Question


Country: United States




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How optimal do you want? This could become very ludicrous if so desired...

Rough algorithmic approach:
1. Compute the distances from Jerry to all cheeses, all cheeses to all other cheeses, and all cheeses to Jerry. Guess to be O( kNM) complexity with O(NM) memory
2. Iteratively search for pathing between all the Tom->cheeses->Jerry. This would be O(k!) complexity with O(k) memory for OPTIMAL solution. I'd probably forgo the optimal solution here and use something more easy to compute like using a Genetic Algorithm, ACO, or (egad) greedy if k is expected to be larger than 20.

- zortlord August 18, 2015 | Flag Reply
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There's an optimal O(n^2 * 2^n) algorithm for step 2 that's based on dynamic programming (state is combination of current location and the subset of cheese locations that are visited). That should be able to cover slightly larger cases, but still not very large.

- Anonymous August 28, 2015 | Flag


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