If you’re standing at 0°, measured from the centre of the asteroid to the surface, the horizon you can see is 26.8° away. Or to put it another way you can see the ground 23’ feet away from you.
Your eyes are 56’ from the centre of the asteroid. The ground ahead of you is 50’ from the centre. You can draw a right-angled triangle connecting the centre, your eyes, and the horizon point. Then use inverse cos(50/56) to get the angle of 26.8, and multiply 100pi by 26.8/360 to get the distance away.
I was definitely just reading the wikipedia page on the catenary and thinking, “What job are they hiring for at Amazon?”
Way to ruin my Blade Runner memories 
Why should I give Amazon the answer for free? Hire me first and then I will work for you.
As a puzzle it’s irritating because the default assumption is that you don’t need specialist knowledge outside of what you’re told. Like, when I saw it here I just assumed there would be a way to do it without any calculus (or knowledge of some formula), so it’s annoying to eventually give up and find out that, nope, you’re just supposed to google it.
In an interview context, you might infer that you’re supposed to demonstrate some math ability, so I guess I’d set to working it out from first principles using basic mechanics and finding the limit as you approximate the chain as an increasing number of linked rods etc. I doubt I’d get to the end but I wouldn’t just sit there drooling. And I suppose the “clever” part is that they’re looking for you to spot that the second answer involves the two poles being right next to each other but I mean jfc.
Aye. If you happen to know the formula for a parabola off the top of your head then: easy(ish)
If not: you’re fucked. You could sort-of estimate it using a triangle as an approximation, but the one-decimal-place requiremment would likely scupper that.
On the other hand … an accurate and correct answer is 0.0km, to one decimal place. Would that be acceptable, i wonder? Prolly not.
Please tell me this was an interview for an engineering job or the like, where this is a relevant skill.
According to the video, only the 10’ case was used as the interview question, and that one doesn’t require any math beyond simple arithmetic.
Nonsense, the asteroid miners mined it into a perfect sphere because of - reasons.
This is one of those annoying questions where your answer needs to include your assumptions, so you could just state “assume the physical properties of the cable are such that it bends at a hard angle in the middle point between the two poles”, and then it’s easy-peasy. Engineering professors love these types of questions.
Which makes the title clickbait. It gives you the “real math” version for the outrage, but the trick question that just requires observation was the test.
Maybe if you’re doing structural engineering of some kind. In software engineering there’s a near-zero chance you’ll ever need to do anything like this. Which is precisely why technical interview questions like this are so stupid and only serve to make the interviewer feel superior rather than actually demonstrate any qualifications for a given position.
Exactly my point.
I write software, and design systems, etc., but what I do isn’t engineering in the same sense as civil, structural, electrical, etc. engineering.
Is the interviewee allowed to look up equations? Testing the ability to do search for and apply information is potentially valid.
If they’re not allowed to look it up, and the job posting isn’t for a mathematician, it’s a dumb thing to put in the interview…
I’m not so sure. What if the point isn’t to see if the candidate gets the right answer or even what their methodology for trying to solve it is, but just to test how they handle an unexpected situation?
Think about it this way - let’s say you have two candidates with similar qualifications. You give this problem to each of them. Neither of them have a clue about the answer, but one of them starts sweating and maybe gets defensive, while the other one attacks it with gusto and tries different ways of solving it through diagrams and throwing out ideas. Now, if you are hiring for a job that may encounter unexpected problems, which one of these two would you prefer for that position based on what their responses tell you about their individual personalities? (hint: it’s the second candidate)
That’s usually the point of these kinds of questions. It’s not to see if they can get the right answer, it’s to see how they think and how they work under stress. Like the Kobyashi Maru, it’s a test of character and to get a glimpse into the person’s mind. Can they think independently or are they an automaton that needs to be told what to do.
The video answer shows how to break the problem down to the crucial elements and if I were conducting the interview (and having been thru these types of interviews myself many times), I would be looking for evidence that the candidate can talk through the problem and think about it critically.
Even a creative non-answer like @JonS mentions above would score points in my book.
Right but I think it could even be instructive just to see how they react to being presented a problem completely out of left field like this, regardless of their abilities to talk through it and think critically about it.
oh, and…
A catenary curve superficially resembles a parabola, but is not one.
It’s funny to me because I totally bombed my interview with Amazon AWS a few years ago.
I had prepped for weeks and was totally focused on the specific work sample exercise they had me prepare for, but then froze and cramped up when thrown an off-the-cuff exercise to design a CDN application for airplane entertainment system on a whiteboard.
In hindsight, it’s probably best that I didn’t get that job as I hear from friends that AWS is a total meat grinder for techies (much like MS, Apple, Google, etc…). Great for resume enhancement but it takes years off your life assuming you survive.
