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I just gave it a shot; I would definitely need more than 25 minutes.

> I am not sure I'd get the adjacent mines part correct on the first attempt

Yeah, getting to that point was easy. Solving that problem is where I got stuck. I'm sure I'd get it eventually, but getting to that point and figuring that out in 25 minutes is asking a bit too much.

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Perhaps that is suited for candidates with image processing experience, because looking at surrounding pixels is a common pattern in image and video codecs. I suspect APL-family experience/thinking style will also help significantly (if you haven't seen it, I recommend watching this video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4 )

The floodfill part (the last one), on the other hand, is the one that stands out in difficulty compared to the previous parts.

Really? We had informal flood fill competitions in my high school... If you understand recursion, it's easy. If you don't... there's so many other things than flood fill you just can't do. And the generalization of saying "oh, that's just a work list" is easy and enables even more things.

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