The Hosteller Interview Questions and Answers

Round duration - 90 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Coding question of medium level difficulty, from DP. 
18 MCQs were core CSE related concepts e.g: OS, OOPs, DBMS, Networking
Time was 90 minutes.

Q1. 
Minimum Cost to Destination
You are given an NxM matrix consisting of '0's and '1's. A '1' signifies that the cell is accessible, whereas a '0' indicates that the cell is blocked. Your task is to compute ...read more
Ans. 
Find the minimum cost to reach a destination in a matrix with blocked cells.
• Use Breadth First Search (BFS) algorithm to explore all possible paths from the starting point to the destination.

• Keep track of the cost incurred at each cell and update it as you move through the matrix.

• Return the minimum cost to reach the destination or -1 if it is unreachable.
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Round duration - 30 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

It was an one-to-one interview. It checks your problem solving ability and a few OOPs, OS, DBMS etc concepts. Coding questions were related to array, queue and DP.

Q1. 
Triangle Formation Using Array Elements
Given an integer array/list ARR of length 'N', determine if it is possible to form at least one non-degenerate triangle using the values of the array as the sides o...read more
Ans. 
Determine if it is possible to form a non-degenerate triangle using array elements as sides.
• Check if the sum of any two sides is greater than the third side for all combinations of sides.

• If the above condition is met for any combination, return true; otherwise, return false.
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Q2. 
Maximum Sum of Non-Adjacent Elements
You are given an array/list of integers. The task is to return the maximum sum of a subsequence such that no two elements in the subsequence are adjacent in the given ...read more
Ans. 
Find the maximum sum of non-adjacent elements in an array.
• Use dynamic programming to keep track of the maximum sum at each index, considering whether to include the current element or not.

• At each index, the maximum sum can be either the sum excluding the current element or the sum including the current element but excluding the previous element.

• Iterate through the array and update the maximum sum accordingly.

• Example: F...read more
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Round duration - 45 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

It was also a problem solving round. However after coding questions, they also asked CSE conceptual questions.

Q1. 
Sum Tree Conversion
Convert a given binary tree into its sum tree. In a sum tree, every node's value is replaced with the sum of its immediate children's values. Leaf nodes are set to 0. Finally, return th...read more
Ans. 
Convert a binary tree into a sum tree by replacing each node's value with the sum of its children's values. Return preorder traversal.
• Traverse the tree in a bottom-up manner, starting from the leaf nodes.

• For each node, update its value to the sum of its children's values.

• Set leaf nodes to 0.

• Return the preorder traversal of the modified tree.
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Q2. What are the core concepts of indexing in Database Management Systems (DBMS)?
Ans. 
Core concepts of indexing in DBMS include types of indexes, benefits of indexing, and factors affecting index performance.
• Types of indexes: B-tree, Hash, Bitmap, etc.

• Benefits of indexing: Faster data retrieval, improved query performance, reduced disk I/O.

• Factors affecting index performance: Selectivity, clustering factor, index fragmentation.

• Examples: Creating an index on a column in a table to speed up search queries
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