Praveen's Blog

An Eternal Quest for Incremental Improvement

There are no tricks - this is a straight forward problem. This is supposed to be one of the questions which potential Microsoft employees are asked.

U2 have a concert that starts in 17 minutes and they must all cross a bridge to get there. All four men begin on the ...


I have spent more time to prepare the solution for this problem compared to the time I took to solve it. This is one damn case where a lot of problems with formatting. Hence I am not able to post it as a comment. So, I am posting it as ...


One of the news about this puzzle is that

This quiz is supposed to have been written by Einstein. He said that 98% of the people in the world cannot solve the quiz. Could you be among the other 2%?

No matter it is Einstein's puzzle or not, it ...


A man lives on the tenth floor of a building. Every day he takes the elevator to go down to the ground floor to go to work or to go shopping. When he returns he takes the elevator to the seventh floor and walks up the stairs to reach his ...


Three people check into a hotel. They pay £30 to the manager and go to their room. The manager suddenly remembers that the room rate is £25 and gives £5 to the bellboy to return to the people. On the way to the room the bellboy reasons that £5 would ...


The distance between Station Atena and Station Barcena is 90 miles. A train starts from Atena towards Barcena. A bird starts at the same time from Barcena straight towards the moving train. On reaching the train, it instantaneously turns back and returns to Barcena. The bird makes these journeys from ...


One of the column in "The Hindu" which recently grabbed the interest of a lot of readers is the column 'su do ku', a puzzle game. This column gain more fame in short time over it's very old brother column, the "Crossword". There is an official website for this ...


I am trying to solve the puzzles available at Python challenge. I know a bit of Python. But the puzzles are interesting. Why don't you give a try!


This might be of interest for those sitting for placement. How do you swap two integers in C without creating a temporary variable ?

#include <stdio .h>
int main(void)
{
        int a = 100;
        int b = 200;

        printf("a=%d | b=%d\n",a,b);
        a ^= b ^= a ^= b;
        printf("a=%d ...