10+ Mckinley Rice Creativity Interview Questions and Answers

Determine the minimum number of platforms needed at a railway station so that no train has to wait.

• Sort the arrival and departure times arrays in ascending order.

• Initialize two pointers for arrival and departure times, and a variable to keep track of the maximum number of platforms needed.

• Increment the platform count when a train arrives and decrement when a train departs.

• Update the maximum platform count as needed.

• Return the maximum platform count at the end.

Determine if it is possible to split a string into three non-empty substrings where one is a substring of the other two.

• Check if any substring of the string is a substring of the other two substrings.

• Iterate through all possible divisions of the string into three non-empty substrings.

• Use two pointers to find all possible substrings efficiently.

Determine the maximum amount of money a thief can steal from houses without looting two consecutive houses.

• Create an array 'dp' to store the maximum money that can be stolen up to the i-th house.

• Iterate through the houses and update 'dp' based on whether the current house is stolen or not.

• Return the maximum value in 'dp' as the answer.

Implement a function to find the maximum possible height of a stack of boxes given their dimensions.

• Create all possible rotations of each box to consider all orientations for stacking

• Sort the boxes based on their base dimensions in non-increasing order

• Use dynamic programming to find the maximum height of the stack

The task is to find the minimum number of operations required to create a valid path from node A to node B by reversing edges in a directed graph.

• Iterate through the graph to find the shortest path from node A to node B.

• Use a graph traversal algorithm like BFS or DFS to explore possible paths.

• Track the number of edge reversals needed to reach node B from node A.

• Consider edge directions and reverse them as needed to create a valid path.

• Return the minimum number of edge reversa...read more

Implement a function to process queries on a binary matrix by flipping elements and counting zeros in rows/columns.

• Create a binary matrix with all elements initialized to 0.

• Process queries of type 1 by flipping elements in the specified row/column.

• Process queries of type 2 by counting the number of zeros in the specified row/column.

• Return the count of zeros for type 2 queries.

• Ensure to handle the constraints provided in the problem statement.

The task is to find the length of the longest increasing path in a matrix starting from a given cell.

• Create a recursive function to explore all possible paths from the starting cell, keeping track of the length of each path.

• Use dynamic programming to avoid redundant calculations and optimize the solution.

• At each cell, check if moving to the right or down is possible and leads to an increasing path.

• Update the length of the longest increasing path found so far as you explore di...read more

The problem involves determining the lexicographic permutation rank of a distinct string.

• Iterate through all permutations of the string and compare with the given string to determine the rank.

• Use a recursive function to generate all permutations of the string.

• Keep track of the count of permutations smaller than the given string to determine the rank.

Designed a scalable system for Pastebin with various requirements.

• Implemented a distributed system architecture to handle high traffic and ensure reliability.

• Used load balancing techniques to evenly distribute incoming requests across multiple servers.

• Implemented data sharding to partition data across multiple databases for efficient storage and retrieval.

• Utilized caching mechanisms to improve performance and reduce latency.

• Implemented access control mechanisms to ensure data...read more