Alternate FizzBuzz Questions [closed]

Anybody have any good FizzBuzz type questions that are not the FizzBuzz problem?

I am interviewing someone and FB is relatively well known and not that hard to memorize, so my first stop in a search for ideas is my new addiction SO.

I've seen a small list of relatively simple programming problems used to weed out candidates, just like FizzBuzz. Here are some of the problems I've seen, in order of increasing difficulty:

1. Reverse a string
2. Reverse a sentence ("bob likes dogs" -> "dogs likes bob")
3. Find the minimum value in a list
4. Find the maximum value in a list
5. Calculate a remainder (given a numerator and denominator)
6. Return distinct values from a list including duplicates (i.e. "1 3 5 3 7 3 1 1 5" -> "1 3 5 7")
7. Return distinct values and their counts (i.e. the list above becomes "1(3) 3(3) 5(2) 7(1)")
8. Given a string of expressions (only variables, +, and -) and a set of variable/value pairs (i.e. a=1, b=7, c=3, d=14) return the result of the expression ("a + b+c -d" would be -3).

These were for Java, and you could use the standard libraries so some of them can be extremely easy (like 6). But they work like FizzBuzz. If you have a clue about programming you should be able to do most pretty quickly. Even if you don't know the language well you should at least be able to give the idea behind how to do something.

Using this test one of my previous bosses saw everything from people who aced it all pretty quick, to people who could do most pretty quick, to one guy who couldn't answer a single one after a half hour.

I should also note: he let people use his computer while they were given these tasks. They were specifically instructed that they could use Google and the like.

Perhaps this does not answer your question directly, but I am not certain you need to come up with another problem. Besides being "easy to memorize", the FizzBuzz question is just plain "easy", and that is the point. If the person you are interviewing is in the class of people to which FizzBuzz is "well-known", then they are in the class of people that a FizzBuzz-type question would not filter out. That does not mean that you hire them on the spot, but it does mean that they should be able to breeze through it and get on to the meat of the interview.

To put it another way, anybody who takes the time to read Coding Horror is worth interviewing further. Just have them write out the solution really quickly, discuss it briefly (e.g., How do you test this?), and then move on to the next question. And as the article says, "it is genuinely astonishing how many candidates are incapable of the simplest programming tasks."

Any of the early ones from Project Euler would probably be good.

For example:

Problem 25

The Fibonacci sequence is defined by the recurrence relation:

Fn = Fn−1 + Fn−2, where F1 = 1 and F2 = 1.

Hence the first 12 terms will be:

F1 = 1
F2 = 1
F3 = 2
F4 = 3
F5 = 5
F6 = 8
F7 = 13
F8 = 21
F9 = 34
F10 = 55
F11 = 89
F12 = 144

The 12th term, F12, is the first term to contain three digits.

What is the index of the first term in the Fibonacci sequence to contain 1000 digits?

I've found checking a string if it is a palindrome is a pretty simple one that can be a decent weeder.