Engineering in the white spaces
FizzBuzz is an interview-related meme that did the rounds about a year ago. The idea is that you can use a very simplistic question to screen-out a significant percentage of candidates applying for a job in software development. If you can't program FizzBuzz in a deep coma while having half your brain removed, then you can't program anything properly.
Of course, every software developer is basically a machine in search of curious problems to solve, and I'm no different. Just how outrageous an answer to FizzBuzz would persuade an interviewer to hire me on the spot? Inspired by this Ruby gem, I played a variation in the key of C#. It took about 9 minutes of CPU time to compute a pseudo-random number generator seed that produces the correct answers for the FizzBuzz quiz in an entirely random fashion:
But we all know that coding magic numbers into your code is a no-no, especially in an interview situation. So I turned to a suitable source to see if I could compute 126782503 rather than just hard-coding it. The 28-bit binary equivalent of 126782503 is 0111100011101000110000100111. And sure enough, you can find that binary number hiding sneakily in pi at binary index 3,422,140,640. Unfortunately, it would take quite some time to compute pi to that length, even with the help of the amazing BBP formula.
* Squirbling in your pants is a lot worse than it sounds, especially if the cottage cheese is warm. Just make sure that the rubber bands hold.