☕ The Future of Quantum Computing
Hey Everyone,
Hope you’re all having a fantastic day!
Today’s interview question is from Facebook.
The previous solution is on finding string isomorphisms.
Tech Snippets
Intel explains Quantum Computing
Architecture All Access is a fantastic series by Intel that goes into depth on various topics in computer architecture.
Their past videos were on
Their video on Quantum Computing goes into
Quantum Superposition and Quantum Entanglement
How Quantum Computing can help with the Protein Folding problem
The engineering behind Quantum Computers
This is an awesome blog post by Andrej Karpathy (director of AI/Autopilot at Tesla)
It goes into
Creating a private, public key pair using Elliptic Curve Cryptography and also deriving your associated Bitcoin address.
Creating a Bitcoin transaction and digitally signing it.
Broadcasting this transaction to the Bitcoin network for validation and inclusion in the blockchain.
Ken Shirriff also wrote an awesome article delving into how Bitcoin mining works. You can view that here.
Roadmap to become a DeFi developer
If you’re interested in the Decentralized Finance space (financial applications built on decentralized blockchains), then this is a great GitHub repo with a roadmap on how to get started.
Interview Question
Write a function that takes a string num and an integer k.
The string num represents a non-negative integer.
The function should return the smallest possible integer after removing k digits from num.
You cannot reorder any of the digits! You can only remove them.
Here’s the question in LeetCode.
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Previous Solution
As a refresher, here’s the last question
You are given a list of strings called words and a string pattern.
Return a list of the strings inside words that match pattern.
A word matches the pattern if the letters in the word can be mapped one-to-one to characters in the pattern.
Example
Input: words = ["abc","deq","mee","aqq","dkd","ccc"], pattern = "abb"
Output: ["mee","aqq"]
Explanation: “mee” matches “abb” since m can be mapped to a and e can be mapped to b. The same is true for “aqq”
Here’s the question in Leetcode.
Solution
This question is a bit of an extension on another common interview question, which is to find if two strings are isomorphic.
An isomorphism is a one-to-one mapping (bijection) between two graphs.
In this question, our “graphs” are represented by character strings.
So, we need to find out if a one-to-one mapping can be formed between two strings.
For an example, let’s look at the strings “abb” and “mee”.
We can form a one-to-one mapping with a maps to m and b maps to e.
For “apple” and “zaapy”, we can form a one-to-one mapping with a maps to z, p maps to a, l maps to p and e maps to y.
Each character in the first string maps to only one character in the second string and vice-versa.
How can we calculate if two strings are isomorphic in O(n) time?
One way is to just iterate through both strings and try to create a mapping from the first string to the second and from the second string to the first.
If creating the mapping fails at any point, then you return False.
Here’s the Python 3 code implementing this.
Now, to answer the original question, we can iterate through the string of words and check each word to see if it’s isomorphic with our pattern.
If it is, we add it to an isomorphicWords array and then return that array after the loop terminates.
Here’s the Python 3 code.
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