Cool Summer 2012 Internship Problem Set 7

We’re closing this race with a set of problems that rely heavily on context.

The Cool Summer Internship Race has been a driver of great attitude, since most of what we published left room for creativity, in every sense. What is more important though is that it turned into a driver of entailing actions.

What are we going to do next: we want to offer those who would like to become interns at 4PSA the chance to know us in a competition.

We’re cycling in teams at Skoda Velo Challenge on June 17th, and we’re saving 3 intern spots in our teams for those who have a bike and want to get involved. No, you don’t need to be accepted as an intern by that time. This will be a simple “get to know us” thing that we want to do. More details are available here.

Until then, try solving the problems below until Tuesday, May 15th, 10 am GMT. Do not forget about the rules. You can solve the problem in a small team!

Results must be submitted here.

Advertise yourself

You are creating a search engine and you want to monetize its search results by displaying advertising alongside search results.

What you have to do

Design an online advertising system for the search engine. Specify what type of technology, programming languages and algorithms you will select.

Suggestions

Goals for such a system may be:

Providing users with the most relevant ads.
Providing advertisers with the best possible return of investment.
Minimizing the cost for running this operation.

You can have an interface approach and design 2 or 3 containers for advertisements. You can use your favorite JavaScript framework in order to create containers that will not be very annoying but strategically placed on a webpage in order to attract the user to click them. Include here:

a small prototype in JS of your engine
describe your strategy

Kangaroo Jump over Dambovita

The Dambovita River is X meters wide and an alien kangaroo needs to cross it. Some stepping stones are inserted into the river. The kangaroo will need to jump on the stones, otherwise it will drown.
The kangaroo has a very serious restraint: if it has just jumped Y meters, then its next jump must be of a minimum Y-1 meters up to Y+1 meters. Taking into consideration the fact that the first jump can be only 1 meter long and the given the position of the stones, how would you determine whether the kangaroo can make it to the other bank of the river or not?

What you have to do

Build a prototype.

Suggestions

Analyze the runtime of your algorithm.

Have a great weekend!