Vietnamese grade 11 problem equivalent to Google interview problem
neil.fraser.name
neil.fraser.name
This is a really intriguing view of an achievable CS course in schools. The Vietnamese government really pushed hard when they implemented CS in the curriculum - very farsighted of them.
What I find a little frustrating personally is that in my own high school class in Singapore we were doing problems of probably similar difficulty, only in math. Now ten years later moving into coding I have to learn all this stuff from scratch, not having realised how much (financial and personal) benefit a focus on CS would have brought me if I had gotten into it earlier.
And even today we still haven't brought CS into our education system, not as a full subject. The traditional sciences of physics, chemistry and biology still hold pride of academic place, even though it would be more useful to diversify what students learn (and help them get jobs in tech or start businesses). In the age of the computer, that's a real shame.
edit: Is this story appearing on the front page? It doesn't seem to be for me - was it flagged?
What do I mean? It turns out that the North Vietnamese, while evaluating battlefield losses about the time of the Tet Offensive (early 1968), performed a simple calculation and realized that the North Vietnamese birthrate was high enough that they could (and would) tolerate their losses in perpetuity and would therefore be able to continue fighting forever if necessary.
What I find astonishing is that no decisionmakers on the American side ever figured this out -- the U.S. military and political leadership persisted in their belief that the other side would eventually run out of young men and women to send into battle, and would therefore have to give up. A simple demographic calculation argued otherwise.
The above central fact about the Vietnamese War made American withdrawal inevitable, yet nearly no one in the U.S. even realizes it now -- it's not included in most histories of the war and its central significance to the outcome isn't widely appreciated.
I guess even Google's "education department" feeling stymied by the crushing force of American public education is not really surprising.
It is more like a lumber mill that produces uniform boards, some with more knots and bits of bark showing than others, but all of the same nominal dimensions that have not changed much since the 1800s.
We may see some change with the advent of MOOCs (if they spread to earlier grades) and with the possibility of publishers being able to afford to produce local-to-each-state textbook elements, but the combined influence of D. of Ed. funding, Texas and California textbook approval, teachers' unions, and ever-growing administrative inertia is a lot to overcome.