21 MARCH 2017 – At NUS Career Fair 2017, Numerical Technologies launched its forth Talent Hunt challenge that gave new graduates and graduating students an opportunity to showcase their programming and analytic skills.
To register for the challenge participants had to solve given puzzles. Only correct answer submission led to the final challenge.
The final challenges
The final challenge involved answering one of two problems:
Question 1
Suppose that you are going to start your own “high-tech” poultry farming business. With limited resources, you are not only going to become a chicken farmer, but also a business-oriented engineer who wants stay out of trouble from PETA. Assume that you have already had land, capital, and equipment, now you are going to make a decision on poultry feeds.
- “It is the first step that costs troublesome”. Out of the 1000 different kinds of poultry feed you bought, unfortunately, there is one type that is poisonous. Write a program to automate the toxicity testing of poultry feeds on chickens to find out the poisonous one with the most effective method.
- “It never rains but it pours”. Out of the 1000 different kinds of poultry feeds you bought the second time, more than one type are poisonous. Write a program to automate the toxicity testing of poultry feeds on chickens to find out all the poisonous ones with the most effective method.
- BONUS: After eliminating the poisonous poultry feeds, your chicken farm business is just fine. A friend told you that some combinations of poultry feeds can grow your chickens twice bigger; however, some combinations might kill your chickens instantly. Write another program to automate the test of poultry feeds on chickens to find out the best combinations.
Hint for problem 1 and 2:
It takes quite an amount of time for the chickens to digest the poisonings, in other words, your primary goal should be minimizing the number of trials (i.e., minimizing the number of for loops); however, the time for each chicken to finish eating different kinds of feeds can be neglected (i.e., for any chicken, the time consumed to eat 1 or n (n>1) types of feeds is the same). Therefore, limiting the number of testing subjects (chickens) should be your secondary goal.
Question 2
- How many plates of chicken rice are sold in Singapore annually?
- What is the rate of change of the number of chicken rice served in Singapore annually?
Challenge Winner
After evaluating the answers to the final challenge, Numerical Technologies is pleased to announce the top 4 participants:
Challenge Winner and Winner of an iPad mini 4:
Yifei, Wang (National University of Singapore, Risk Management Institute, Financial Engineering)
Honourable Mention:
Rei Yun, Tan (National University of Singapore, Science, Quantitative Finance)
Ziyang, Mou (National University of Singapore, Science, Applied Mathematics)
Zexin, Wang (National University of Singapore, Science, Quantitative Finance)
Thank you once again for all participants and congratulations to Yifei, Rei Yun, Ziyang, and Zexin! We had a great fun reviewing all of your creative ideas and solutions.
More information about DevOps Software Developer position is available at our careers.numtech.com.
Yifei received an iPad mini 4 for winning a challenge!
