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Bloomberg LP Interview Question Financial Software Developers

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    0
    of 0 votes
    7
    Answers

    How to search a number among a lot of numbers. I asked if it is one time thing. Answer is yes. Then I did sequential search; Then he said how about search another one....
    Then I said sort these numbers first and suggest binary tree.
    Wrote down the binary search code

    - sana on February 03, 2011 Report Duplicate | Flag
    Bloomberg LP Financial Software Developer Algorithm

More Questions from This Interview

Comment hidden because of low score. Click to expand.
2
of 2 vote

Maybe they wanted to check what kind of questions to ask given such a simple requirement.

Also, there is a glitch in the implementation of Binary Search, specially when we do
mid = (low + high)/2
If the numbers are really large, the sum of (low + high) would overflow and cycle to a negative number.
One work around is to use
mid = low + (high - low)/2

HTH,
Chander

- Chander Shivdasani on February 04, 2011 | Flag Reply
Comment hidden because of low score. Click to expand.
1
of 1 vote

There is a one time cost of O(nlogn) to sort the numbers. But if the search is to be carried out frequently then the cost of each search will be O(n) if the list is not sorted as opposed to O(log n) if the list is sorted

- abhimanipal on January 22, 2012 | Flag Reply
Comment hidden because of low score. Click to expand.
0
of 0 vote

sort and binary search

- GekkoGordan on February 03, 2011 | Flag Reply
Comment hidden because of low score. Click to expand.
0
of 0 vote

Could it be this easy??

- ninghsu267 on February 04, 2011 | Flag Reply
Comment hidden because of low score. Click to expand.
0
of 0 vote

Why not use a Hash?
Is using external memory a case?
Hash will give you the number at one shot

- Ajay Singh on February 04, 2011 | Flag Reply
Comment hidden because of low score. Click to expand.
0
of 0 votes

Ajay, What do you mean by 'use a Hash' ? Did you want to hash the numbers in the stream ? Or, use a Hashtable? How does either help you in the case of a very large set of numbers?

- Anon on February 19, 2011 | Flag
Comment hidden because of low score. Click to expand.
-1
of 1 vote

If you sort and binary search, the time complexity is O(NlogN), which is not better than the linear search O(N). Hence, you can't use sort.

- Zhengli Sun on April 24, 2011 | Flag Reply


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