C exam aside, I don't think he would pass a regular Big G interview, unless he'd allocate some 6 months for preps which I doubt he did.
If you refer to this:
https://www.quora.com/When-do-you-need-to-invert-a-binary-tr...
I also don't know why would anybody ever need to implement "inverting" a binary tree except for the Google exam.
> Most likely he implemented more binary trees in his live
"Most likely"? Actually he "just" invented (not a complete list):
- Unix (with Ritchie) (in assembly first)
- the language B, based on which Ritchie developed C.
- the notation for the regular expressions everybody uses today
- the algorithm for fast regular expression handling
- the chess computer that won the 3rd World Computer Chess Championship 1980
> "Most likely"? Actually he "just" invented (not a complete list):
Please mind the full quote of me "... than I thought of" -- I thought (and implemented) about trees quite a bit myself and grant him a few factors on top of that.
He implemented a BCPL dialect, which he called B, in fact if you compare B and BCPL programming manuals they are quite similar.
I know I thought it would be a lot harder than it was. I spent some hours checking example interview questions, and it was definitely enough. If anything, I might have been too focused on thinking in terms of established algorithms, and too little focused on reasoning on my own.
But it's irrelevant to what I wanted to point to: that somebody already accepted Ken Thompson to Google. Then some absurd bureaucracy decided that Ken Thompson has to pass the exams given to the young beginners. Probably reasoning something like somebody here "explained" "so that developers can be moved around."
Whoever is not aware of these "details", please see my another post for what Ken Thompson invented before coming to Google. Such "minor things" like the Unix OS, the language that preceded and inspired C and the currently used kind of regular expressions.