Interviews these days
(midwest.social)
VetOfTheSeas
People TwitterToo many people are obsessing about 4d topology in this thread. The real difficulty in the question is the non -deterministic pathfinding of the ant, in the absence of pheromones.
making sure you cannot solve it, so you are perfect for the job
Possible candidate responses:
- Solves it (too smart for job)
- "That's bullshit, who needs this for a $14.50/hr job?" (too intolerant of bullshit for job)
- Tries to solve it but fails (lacks self-awareness for job)
- Knows they can't solve it so doesn't even try (too lazy for job)
- Doesn't understand the question/comprehend what a hypercube is (too dumb for job)
Maybe they're trying to weed out all actual applicants because they're hiring the boss' kid.
You forgot option 6, spew a bunch of techno bubble at the HR person who will definitely not understand the problem themselves and wouldn't be able to tell if you'd answered it or not.
I'd argue that 3 and 5 are actually selection qualities for a job paying that low, with a question like that. The rest are all dis-qualifiers of course.
I believe this is sometimes the case. I was called for an interview with a group of 15 other people ones. We were like a class, being interviewed as a group, and were supposed to solve some problems together. Nobody in that group could solve even the simple, obvious problems - we're talking basic math and reading comprehension here. Got an email the next day informing me that they had I had not been selected for recruitment.
Entry level positions to Gregg's (fast food sausage roll chain) require 1000 word personal statements as part of online applications
Yeah but you also get equity in the company so I think that's fair enough.
You have to be proven worthy before you are handed the recipe for the vegan sausage roll. I want to know what addictive substance they put in there.
Ever heard of ChatGPT?
Sure. Draw the cube for me and I will plot it's path.
Here you go:
I still don't understand it. Can you rotate it along the W axis so I can visualize it better?
That renders in 2d for me
No shit? Next thing you say that there are no 3d games, because there are no 3d monitors. And those that say they are 3d as well as VR are just faking it, by using two 2d projections instead of one.
Just code up a lemmy plugin that lets you embed basic interaction for navigating 4D shapes, my dude. It's just basic eigenvectors.
Just wait until they figure out how eyes work
You must be fun at parties
Choose a starting face and remember it. Walk each face of a cell containing that face touching each face once much like you would a 3-cube.
Pick any adjoining cell and move into one of its faces from there, walk each of its faces saving the one opposite the face you started on for last.
From there you're on a shared face with the cell opposite your starting cell. Traverse this one in a similar manner to the last, but this time also visit the adjoining faces of each cell adjacent to the second cell you filled, before once again ending opposite the face you started on for this cell.
Now you're on a shared face with the final cell, opposite the face you started on. Walk around the remaining four faces and you're done.
Followed these steps, ended up on the ceiling of my neighbor's tea room.
Okay, if you can explain to me in detail how four dimensional topology is going to be important to me while I'm stocking the shelves of your grocery store, I'll give you an answer.
stocking the shelves of your grocery store
See that's what's so ragebaity about the post. There's no mention of what the job was, which means people can just make up whatever bit of background allows them to feel the most superior.
Isn't a cube by definition a 3 dimensional object? If it were 4 dimensional, it would no longer be a cube.
Its a generalisation. A 4d cube is a shape that has the same length in all 4 dimensions. You can also talk of 5d cubes, 6d cubes, etc. These are commonly called n-cubes: a 4-cube is a 4d cube.
There are also 4D spheres, even though spheres are definitionally 3D. They are called n-spheres.
robot voice: how many 'd' is <USER_MATERNAL_PROGENITOR> a...cube...within? Ha ha. Ha ha.
::: spoiler spoiler
I looked:
ERROR: unbounded_index
Does not compute. Ha ha.
:::
Four dimensional? That is a tesseract. This is impossible to describe how an ant would even interact with let alone touch all eight cells only once.
The ant is a mathematical metaphor - a point that can trace a path along any surface and can cross to another surface only by crossing an edge, but cannot leave the surface.
Once done with the first cube, the ant takes a gondola, going along the 4th dimension and repeats the walk he did on the first cube.
This is a lot like when Boston PD was found to screen out all the smart applicants. Sometime the company wants an obedient idiot.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/too-smart-to-be-a-cop/
Might actually be the case, lol.
Answer this question correctly (or even intelligently at all) and your application is rejected.
Well technically as the ant is traveling across the fourth dimension, time in most cases, in the example meaning it instantaneously travels the entire surface and touches the faces an infinite number of times in an infinite path unless only one edge touches a surface without any 3 dimensional velocity. If the latter, then let us define the faces along said edge as 1 and 4, the faces between but parallel in edges as 2 and 3, and the faces on the perpendicular axis as 5 and 6. Then, its path is 1, 5, 2, 6, 3, 4, and dismount. To ensure the ant never again approaches the cube in infinite time, have it travel in a perfect circle around the cube infinitely.
In mathematics, the 4th dimension isn't in any way privileged, so the ant isn't "traveling across the fourth dimension" as such, it's tracing a path through all four dimensions, just like you'd trace a path through three dimensions.
Every cube is four dimensional, assuming time as the fourth dimension. So it would travel forward in time at a relatively constant rate (since ants don’t typically walk at relativistic speeds [citation needed]) and it would traverse the other three dimensions in normal ant ways.
Damnnn bro. They gonna start you at $15 with that kinda mind.
If the ant can only move a single direction in time, it cannot reach all the time corners. Every corner in 3 dimensional space has a twin corner, at the beginning and end of time. Since the ant can only walk forward in time, it will only reach 2 4D corners, where it started, and where it ended.
Interviewer did not define time. I will define it as 0 seconds per second. The ant can not move as movement is impossible at this time scale.
I was thinking 4 spatial dimensions and was trying to trace a hypercube
You were doing it for free?
This is a direct appliacation of the hairy ball theorem.
I ain't even kidding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem
Hairy ball theorem applies to even-dimensional spheres (the ordinary sphere is the 2D surface of the 3D solid), but a cube in four-dimensional space is a three-dimensional surface, so it doesn't apply.
This is a question about graph theory, not topology; it's asking for a Hamiltonian path on the surface of 4D cube (where faces are vertices, which is different than the normal polytope graph).
You are right.
However most proofs of the hairy ball theorem also prove the converse, so that there is a continous non vanishing tangent vector field on uneven dimensional sphere surfaces.
This can be extended to all 3 dimensional surfaces in 4 dimensions homomorphic to the sphere. The ant walking can follow the vector field and solve this problem topologically.
My point being that the HR goon following the expected leet code solution might not understand this because they might expect the "approved" graph theory solution rather than an alternative approach.
Why does following a tangent vector field visit all faces of the hypercube? Surely it's not going to visit something like a dense subset of the hypersphere's surface? (Or is it? My intuition comes from thinking about the torus)
I'm more interested in the maths ;)
You're hired 🤝
Yaayyy, where's my hypercubicle?
"with it's legs"
*its
One does not simply walk into the 4th dimension
You're hired.
Just the sort of employee we want here at Moore Door & Supply.
"it would start by crawling up your ass."
Be glad you got the shitty interview instead of getting ghosted
Wait, isn’t this trivial?
If we’re talking about “faces” as in the cubic faces of a tesseract then each of the 8 faces are connected to all other faces except the opposite face. So just spiral around from your starting face (keeping the faces you’ve visited on the inside of the spiral) and you’re fine.
If you mean 2D faces connecting the 3D ones, then things get more difficult but not that much because you can do the exact same thing. Choose a 1D edge as your origin, pick a face touching that edge to start with, traverse that edge twice to get the next two faces. Then traverse three faces which share edges with those faces you already traversed (there are 6 faces with this property, 3 for each vertex of our origin edge, the set you pick determines the “direction” of your overall progress through/around the tesseract). Repeat that step again but for the faces that share edges with two of the three you just did. Repeat again and again and again until the last three faces share a vertex with the origin edge you started with. You’re done.
Am I missing something? Did the prompt mean to say you can only traverse each edge once?
Edit: the 2D face path I described would miss 6 faces. Those six faces should be traversed in the middle, so do the first three faces, the second three, then all six which touch both those three you just traversed and the three you would have done next on the original path. Then do the rest just like I originally mentioned.
I understood some of those words.
But the sentences continue to elude me
Have you ever seen one of those images of a tesseract where it’s like a cube in a cube? (You can just look up “tesseract” to find an image)
Now, pick one of the corners of the outer cube and find the line that connects it to a corner of the inner cube. That’s our origin “edge” and we’re basically just going to move in through the cube along that direction.
There are three “faces” which share that “edge” (line). We do those ones first.
Then we move deeper in and do the three faces of the inner cube which share the corner our origin line connects to.
Then we have to zig zag around the six “faces” that exist between inner and outer cubes which are roughly perpendicular to our origin edge. (Imagine you broke the tesseract in half by cutting halfway between your starting corner and the corner opposite it. The “faces” we need to traverse would intersect that plane)
After that, we do the three faces on the far side of the inner cube. (The ones opposite our starting corner)
Then we do the three around the line which connects that far corner of the inner cube to the outer cube.
Then we do the three faces on the outside of the large cube at that corner.
Finally we do the three faces on the outside of the cube around our starting corner.
tricky with only four dimentions, but I'd use a Grathenbour's loop with a transverse Z axis movement if gimbal locks are ignored, naturally.
How does this compare in efficiency to casting Xagyg's Planar Binding and simply using a standard verity geas to question a daemon from one of the higher hypergeometric dimensions?
Well I think the ant would probably wander around until it found food
"They would head towards the exit" and before they process youre already standing up and walking away.
Forward, left, right, forward, left.
That’s a three dimensional cube.
Which I thought by definition was a cube.
What is a four dimensional cube?
What is a two dimensional cube?
What is a four dimensional cube?
2 three dimensional cubes, A and B, and each corner in A is connected by a new edge to it's equivalent corner in B. This is also called a tesseract.
What is a two dimensional cube?
A square.
In general, if you have an n-dimensional cube, you can get an n+1 dimensional cube by doubling it, and connecting each corner with it's equivalent corner.
A 0-dimensional cube is just a single dot.
A 1-dimensional cube is a two dots, connected by a line.
A 2-dimensional cube is 2 lines, connected. Also called a square.
A 3-dimensional cube is 2 squares, connected. Also called, well, a cube.
A 4-dimensional cube is 2 cubes, connected. Also called a tesseract.
A 5-dimensional cube is 2 tesseracts, connected.
In general, this is called the n-dimensional hypercube.
And continuing this, each edge on an n-dimensional cube will, together with its copy and the two edges connecting it to its copy, form another face on the n+1 dimensional cube. This new face will border exactly one face on the original cube, and one face on the copy. It's also bordered by two other connecting faces.
So, basically, if I start out on a face on the original cube, I can walk onto a connecting face, and then walk around all four connecting faces, and walk to the copy face. From there, I walk to another copy face, over the four connecting faces, and then back to the original cube. This way I should be able to continue going back and fourth between the cube and the copy, always walking across all the connecting faces.
I got a rubics cube here, with sides white, red, blue, orange, green, and yellow. For each of these faces, there exist 5 additional ones on the tesseract. For white: white, white_copy, and white_c1 to white_c4.
The solution is white, white_c1, white_c2, white_c3, white_c4, white_copy, red_copy, red_c1, red_c2, red_c3, red_c4, red, green, green_c1, green_c2, green_c3, green_c4, green_copy, orange_copy, orange_c1, orange_c2, orange_c3, orange_c4, orange, blue, blue_c1, blue_c2, blue_c3, blue_c4, blue_copy, yellow_copy, yellow_c1, yellow_c2, yellow_c3, yellow_c5, yellow.
I guess I'll never get that $14/hr job...
4th dimension is time?
5th dimension is your soul, and the 11th dimension, well we don't talk about the 11th dimension.
You can easily add additional dimensions to a three dimensional cube: color, sound, wall thickness, surface material etc.
But can you prove that this solution wouldn't work on a 4 dimensions cube?
This is how you spawn a tank in GTA
We gotta start laughing in their faces
Also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-dimensional_sequential_move_puzzle and
https://hypercubing.xyz/software/
They specifically didn't say it was a hypercube, so I'm going to assume its a normal cube traveling through time and say that it could get to a max of 5 faces by moving forward 3 times, turning 90 degrees and moving forward again. The 6th face can be reached, if the cube's gravity-well is high enough, by getting a really good running start and jumping over the next to land on the 6th, Otherwise the ant is fucked and his father is very disappointed in him.
Or move forward twice, turn 90°, move forward once, turn 90° opposite to the direction you turned earlier, and move forward twice
"Being that the fourth dimension is time, it would need a flux capacitor and have to hit 88mph but where he's going he doesn't need 'sides.'"
I can do my job that pays more than that and I can't do this problem lol. 😂
I dunno if this is supposed to be derisive to the wage, but considering that 9/5s 6 days a week in Venezuela are 200$ monthly... where do I sign? Ill learn physics!
Just one caveat, you have to move to a place where the rent is $2000 a month.
a room here with the right to use the bathroom and the kitchen is 250-300.
That happened
I dunno. I could see this being a customer-facing role and the question is an attempt to weedle out applicants who might respond reflexively with, "That is the dumbest question I've ever heard. Please go away now."
Yeah it is meant to be satire
