Obama is Greater than McCain

Senator Barack Obama recently had a job interview, I mean spoke, at Google, hoping to impress the nerd crowd. And, just like he did previously with Senator McCain, CEO Eric Schmidt asked a trick technical question, although slightly differently this time. No doubt he read my criticisms of his earlier question and tried to tune it up a bit.

As I wrote, McCain lost a good opportunity to profit off his version of the question, "How do you determine good ways of sorting 1 million 32-bit integers in two megabytes of RAM?" He merely laughed it off. But, when Obama was asked for "the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers", he actually made a reasonable but incomplete answer, "I think the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go."

Of course, Obama must have read my earlier blog post and knew that a question like this might be asked. He probably also prepared his answer in advance. But still, he didn't actually answer the question, he merely listed one incorrect answer.

So, what is the right answer. Well, Schmidt again didn't define all his terms. Primarily he didn't say what he meant by "efficient".

Well, to me, efficient means it takes me the least amount of time. So, if I were to be asked this question, the answer would obviously be, load the numbers into Excel and select the Data Sort menu option.

But that is probably not the right answer for candidate Obama. It would depend on exactly what the numbers are and why they needed to be sorted, but in most cases the best method would be to tell one of his interns to sort the numbers and come back with just the top three.

By the way, in my earlier post I said:

Full disclosure. This log is hosted by Blogger, which is owned by Google. So, if this post never shows up in any Google searches, I think I'll know why.

Well, it turns out that there was a huge spike in the number of people visiting my blog with search terms related to sorting of integers right around the time of Obama's interview. This can only mean that the folks at Google are using my blog to help them write better interview questions.

Does this mean I get a cut of the referral bonus?

And, Mayor Giuliani, are you paying attention?