Amazon.com Interview Question
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Interview Question for Software Development Engineer at Amazon.com:
Mar 16, 2011
You are given 1000 containers of water with exactly one container containing poison. You can use pigs to test which container contains poison. The conditions are that: A pig drinking the poisoned water woudl die exactly after 1 hour and that a pig could be used for sampling multiple containers. Assume that the pig takes 0 time to drink water from any number of containers. What is the minimum number of pigs would you use to identify the poisoned container within 1 hour.
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Answers & Comments (4)
Aug 31, 2011
This is an application of the so called Hamming Code for error detection and/or correction.
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Oct 18, 2011
really didnt get this one people. why would i spend 1024 pigs when i can just use 1000 pigs each drinking one container??? please correct me if i am wrong...
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Nov 16, 2011
See the first answer - only 10 pigs are needed following a binary pattern of which pigs drink from which container.
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10 of 10 people found this helpful
by Interview Candidate:
This problem can be viewed as a mapping between bits and container.i.e
0000000000 -> Container 1 (No pig drinks from this container)
0000000001 -> Container 2 (Pig 1 drinks)
0000000010 -> Container 3 (Pig 2 Drinks)
0000000011 -> Container 4 (Pigs 1 and 2 drinks from this container)
0000000100 -> Container 5 (pig 3 drinks from this container)
....
Every container has a unique combination of pigs that sample it. Therefore just examining which combination
of pigs die, one can infer which container holds the poison.