Brainteaser Interview Questions

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Below is a list of brainteasers that Microsoft has asked at interviews:

1) A band is going in the street with a constant speed. Someone in the last row has a dog.
The dog runs ahead, reaches the front row of the band and gets back to its owner. The
dogs speed was constant all the way and while it was running the band passed 50 feet.
Find the length of the dogs path, if the distance between the front and the rear row of the
band is 50 feet.
2) Design a coffee maker that will be used by astronauts.
3) Design a communication device for Canadian park rangers.
4) Design a GPS navigation unit for a hiker.
5) Design a music system for a car. What are the features? Draw a picture.
6) Design a remote control for an automatic window-blind system.
7) Design a search function.
8) Design an alarm clock for a blind person.
9) Design an alarm clock.
10) Design an instant messaging system.
11) Develop an algorithm for selecting objects in Visio.
12) Did you have a moment of epiphany when you KNEW what you wanted to be when you
grew up?
13) Explain a database to a young child.
14) Explain the Internet to your grandparents
15) Give a good method to count the number of ones in a n (e.g. 32) bit number.
16) Give a one-line C expression to test whether a number is a power of 2. No loops allowed.
17) Given a MAKEFILE, design the data structure that a parser would create and then write
code that iterates over that data structure executing commands if needed.
18) Given a rectangular (cuboid for the puritans) cake with a rectangular piece removed (any
size or orientation), how would you cut the remainder of the cake into two equal halves
with one straight cut of a knife?
19) Given an array of characters which form a sentence of words, give an efficient algorithm
to reverse the order of the words (not characters) in it.
20) Given an array of size N in which every number is between 1 and N, determine if there
are any duplicates in it. You are allowed to destroy the array if you like. [ I ended up
giving about 4 or 5 different solutions for this, each supposedly better than the others ].
21) Given only putchar (no sprintf, itoa, etc.) write a routine putlong that prints out an
unsigned long in decimal.
22) How does Microsoft fit into your vision?
23) How many cars are there in the USA?
24) How many times a day do the hands on a clock overlap themselves?
25) How would go about finding out where to find a book in a library. (You do not know
how exactly the books are organized beforehand).
26) How would you deal with a bug that no one wants to fix? Both the SDE and his lead have
said they wont fix it.
27) How would you deal with changes being made a week or so before the ship date?
28) How would you explain what a database is to a 5-year-old?
29) How would you test a keyboard?
30) How would you test a pen?
 Brainteaser Interview Questions
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31) How would you test a program that takes in two points and outputs the distance between
the two points?
32) How would you test a vending machine?
33) How would you test an elevator?
34) I am your grandmother. Describe what MATLAB is to me.
35) If a bear walks one mile south, turns left and walks one mile to the east and then turns left
again and walks one mile north and arrives at its original position, what is the color of the
bear.
36) If you could remove any of the 50 states, which state would it be and why?
37) If you had an infinite supply of water and a 5 quart and 3 quart pail, how would you
measure exactly 4 quarts?
38) Imagine you are standing in front of a mirror, facing it. Raise your left hand. Raise your
right hand. Look at your reflection. When you raise your left hand your reflection raises
what appears to be his right hand. But when you tilt your head up, your reflection does
too, and does not appear to tilt his/her head down. Why is it that the mirror appears to
reverse left and right, but not up and down?
39) Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. Its very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do
to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?
40) Insert in a sorted list.
41) One train leaves Los Angeles at 15mph heading for New York. Another train leaves from
New York at 20mph heading for Los Angeles on the same track. If a bird, flying at
25mph, leaves from Los Angeles at the same time as the train and flies back and forth
between the two trains until they collide, how far will the bird have traveled?
42) Reverse a linked list.
43) Steve Jobs calls and asks you to improve the iPod. Go.
44) Suppose you are one week away from the product shipping date and discover a bug in
your software. What do you do?
45) Tell me about a time when you made a decision and later found out that it was incorrect.
What did you do to resolve the issue?
46) Test the save dialog in Notepad.
47) Test the Windows scroll bar.
48) The government wants cars to keep track of whether or not they are speeding. The part to
determine this is already able to determine the speed of the vehicle, how would you
design the rest of the system.
49) There are 3 baskets. One of them has apples, one has oranges only and the other has
mixture of apples and oranges. The labels on their baskets always lie. (i.e. if the label
says oranges, you are sure that it doesnt have oranges only, it could be a mixture) The
task is to pick one basket and pick only one fruit from it and then correctly label all the
three baskets.
50) There are four ants at four corners of a square of unit distance. At the same instant all of
them start running with unit speed towards the person on their clockwise direction and
will always run towards that target. How long does it take for them to meet and where?
51) What are examples of poorly designed software?
52) What are some examples of poorly/well-designed software? What makes the software
this way and how would you change it?
53) What are some self-directed missions that may have influenced your career direction?
 Brainteaser Interview Questions
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54) What are some things that excite and motivate you?
55) What are the different ways to implement a condition where the value of x can be either a
0 or a 1?
56) What is your favorite Microsoft product? Why?
57) What is your favorite web site? Why? Now improve it.
58) What is your least favorite Microsoft product? Why?
59) What types of projects (academic or otherwise) have inspired you in the past?
60) Whats an example of great product design?
61) Which way should the key turn in a car door to unlock it?
62) Why do mirrors reverse right and left instead of up and down?
63) Why do you want to work for Microsoft?
64) Why is a manhole cover round?
65) Write a function that counts the number of primes in the range [1-N]. Write the test cases
for this function.
66) Write a function that inserts an integer into a linked list in ascending order. Write the test
cases for this function.
67) Write a function that will return the number of days in a month (no using
System.DateTime).
68) Write a routine to draw a circle (x ** 2 + y ** 2 = r ** 2) without making use of any
floating point computations at all.
69) Write the InStr function. Write the test cases for this function.
70) Write the test cases for a vending machine.
71) You have 3 jars. Each jar has a label on it: white, black, or white & black. You have 3
sets of marbles: white, black, and white & black. One set is stored in one jar. The labels
on the jars are guaranteed to be incorrect (i.e. white will not contain white). Which jar
would you choose from to give you the best chances of identifying which set of marbles
in is in which jar.
72) You have 5 jars of pills. Each pill weighs 10 gram, except for contaminated pills
contained in one jar, where each pill weighs 9 gm. Given a scale, how could you tell
which jar had the contaminated pills in just one measurement?
73) You have 8 balls. One of them is defective and weighs less than others. You have a
balance to measure balls against each other. In 2 weighings, how do you find the
defective one?
74) You have a bucket of jelly beans. Some are red, some are blue, and some green. With
your eyes closed, pick out 2 of a like color. How many do you have to grab to be sure you
have 2 of the same?
75) You have two jars, 50 red marbles and 50 blue marbles. A jar will be picked at random,
and then a marble will be picked from the jar. Placing all of the marbles in the jars, how
can you maximize the chances of a red marble being picked? What are the exact odds of
getting a red marble using your scheme?