ELON Musk has a surprising question for hopeful engineers who want to join SpaceX, Tesla, or Neuralink.
Musk and other tech companies have used brain teasers to gauge candidates’ thinking styles. Would you make it in Silicon Valley?
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Musk’s Ultimate Puzzle Is A Combination Of Geometry And Logic
Where in the world is Elon Musk?
Musk is a known fan of pranks, puzzles, and video games that make players think.
In 2015, he told biographer Ashlee Vance about the tricky interview questions he would ask potential hires.
Musk’s favorite is the following:
“You stand on the surface of the Earth. You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?”
If you answered “North Pole,” you’re right, but maybe you’re not on the SpaceX team yet; there is another answer that Musk is looking for.
CNBC posed this puzzle to passing New Yorkers; most had trouble with the second answer.
While Musk mostly just wants to see the candidate’s thought process, the answer is one mile north of the one-mile circle around the South Pole.
From this position, walk one mile south, reaching the highest point of the circle.
Then, when you walk one mile west, you’ll walk a full circle: head north one mile as the riddle says, and you’ll be back where you started.
Are you the next SpaceX astronaut?
A clock with a rope
You have two pieces of string that are coated in oil – when ignited, one string will take an hour to burn.
How can you measure 45 minutes using two pieces of string?
This conundrum appeared in Jimmy Soni’s book The Founders, for which he had direct access to PayPal executives: founder Max Levchin posed this mind meld to Silicon Valley titan Peter Thiel as they discussed ideas that would make them both rich .
The trick is to turn one string on both ends and the other on one end.
A rope with two flames will burn completely in 30 minutes.
At this point, turn on the other end of the second string; remember, you’ve already been burning on one end for 30 minutes.
The second string will come out in 15 minutes, giving you 45 minutes of measured time.
Thiel got the answer right: he and Levchin would go on to build PayPal into a billion-dollar company with an All-Star team of entrepreneurs who still power the Valley today.
Adobe Moped Query
You have 50 gasoline mopeds and each tank can take the moped 100 kilometers. What is the greatest distance you can travel with the 50 mopeds?
The wrong answer, which probably won’t help you get a job at Adobe, is 100 kilometers.
Here’s a tip: all 50 mopeds don’t have to ride together or go the distance.
The answer of a smart engineer would be to use all 50 mopeds to travel 50 kilometers; this will use 50% of the fuel in each tank.
Take the fuel from 25 bikes and pour it into the other 25: now half of the mopeds have full tanks and the other half are not counted.
Repeat this process every 50 kilometers, halving your supply of mopeds from 50 to 25 to 12 to six to three and finally to one.
Remember, every time the number of bikes is halved, you have traveled 50 kilometers; this is done five times, giving you 250 kilometers of travel.
The last remaining moped has a full tank and can travel 100 kilometers; 350 kilometers is a better answer.
But the best answer, according to Interesting Engineering, is to empty the tank on one bike as soon as there is room on the other.
Ride the 50 bikes two kilometers, take fuel from one and distribute it among the remaining 49.
Drive a distance of 100 divided by 49 kilometers to free up enough tank space for more fuel; repeat until there are no bikes left.
This method gives 449.92 kilometers traveled.
The Silicon Valley cult of puzzles stems from the opportunity to watch someone calculate a complex math problem while alert.
The fad for brain teasers as an interview question has largely fallen out of favor after Google’s internal study found that brain teasers didn’t help the company hire the strongest and most elite candidates.
Tech employees who trade experiences on anonymous job boards tend to agree that brainstorming is a turn-off for candidates.
Categories: Optical Illusion
Source: HIS Education