8 04 2017
Haven’t posted in a while, since I’ve been heads down in building a lot of cool tooling at work (blog posts coming), but had a chance to mess around a bit with something that came up in an interview question this week.
I frequently ask candidates a high level design question to build PacMan. Games like pacman are fun because on the surface they are very simple, but if you don’t structure your entities and their interactions correctly the design falls apart.
At some point during the interview we had scaled the question up such that there was now a problem of knowing at a particular point in the game what was nearby it. For example, if the board is 100000 x 100000 (10 billion elements) how efficiently can we determine if there is a nugget/wall next to us? One option is to store all of these entities in a … Read more