I Completed the Google Foobar Challenge

The Google Foobar challenge is a programming challenge used by Google for recruiting. You must be invited to participate (article with more info). The challenge contains five levels of increasing difficulty, which require knowlege in the following areas:

• dynamic programming
• graph theory
• combinatorics

The final level was indeed the most challenging and required me to understand permutation groups and apply the Pólya enumeration theorem.

Upon completion, I received a message encrypted in Base64, which translated to:

{‘success’ : ‘great’,
‘colleague’ : ’esteemed’,
’efforts’ : ‘incredible’,
‘achievement’ : ‘unlocked’,
‘rabbits’ : ‘safe’,
‘foo’ : ‘win!’}

I really enjoyed solving these problems – thanks Mathew for the invite link!