Reaching Gandhinagar

The airport nearest to IITGn is Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport in Ahmedabad. Once at airport, it takes 20-25 minutes and approximately Rs. 300 to reach the campus. Once in campus, report to Gate 2. Though they didn’t mention about providing accommodation but once I was there, they allotted me a room in their hostels with a nominal charge of Rs. 250 per day. The dining hall was next to the hostels. Dining charges were Rs. 49 for lunch and dinner, Rs. 35 for breakfast. The rooms were quite awesome, each had an air-conditioning system installed and other things unlikely to be found in an IIT hostel.


The Interview Day


They asked all the CSE students to assemble in a hall. After an orientation session about the intake and the general guidelines, they divided the students into two batches for the written test. The written test, as they were trying to hint, was focussing majorly on testing the ability of students to code.


Coding Test


The coding test was on the platform of HackerRank. The test supports almost all the languages. The use of STL and languages like Python were also available. The coding questions were:
1. We are given a keyboard. Standing on a key, it takes 0 second to press the key. 1 second to move to all the adjacent keys and 2 second to all the keys next to the adjacent keys i.e.
| 1 | 2 | 3 |
| 4 | 5 | 6 |
| 7 | 8 | 9 |
Suppose we’re standing on key 4, it takes zero second to press the key, 1 second to go on keys 1, 2, 5, 7 and 8 and 2 seconds to go on keys 3, 6 and 9. Given two strings, one containing the configuration of a keyboard and the other one denoting the sequence of number to be types, find the time the system will take to type the complete sequence.
e.g. str1 = “123456789”; str2 = “15235”
key 1 = 0s
moving on key 5 from 1 takes 1s
moving on key 2 from 5 takes 1s
moving on key 3 from 2 takes 1s
moving on key 5 from 3 takes 1s
Therefore, the answer is 4.
2. Given an array, find an index, such that the summation of all elements on the left of the index is equal to the summation of elements on the right.
e.g. arr = [1,2,3,4,6]
ans: 3 (0 based indexing)
3. Given an upper limit U, lower limit L and variable K, find a and b such that L<=a<b<=U and a^b<=k is maximum.
4. Given a sequence of numbers, for each duplicate number present in the sequence, increment it until all the elements in the sequence become unique, such that their sum is minimum as possible.
5. (I don’t remember the language of this question)
Given an adjacency matrix, find the number of connected components in that graph.
Following this, there were 15 MCQs problems based on caching, time and work, graph theory, algorithms, probability and data structures.
Out of approximately 250 students, 75 students were shortlisted for the interview. The interviews began at 2 and were done by 6 in the evening.


Interview


Q. Introduction: done
Q. Given two very big numbers, unable to be held by any variable, how will you add them?
A. Reverse them and store them in array and add each cell etc.
Q. Given two numbers, without using comparator and arithmetic operator, how will you tell whether they are equal or not?
A. XOR them inside if statement and not(!) the whole
Q. Did any projects on machine learning?
A. Explained digit recognition using back propagation algorithm with structure of perceptron models, learning rate, mean squared root error and all.
Q. Any questions from our side?
A. No Sir.
This was my interview experience at IITGn, I made it to the final admit list. Hope it helps.

posted Jun 9, 2019
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