Can Github Copilot beat the hardest coding questions from Google?
Copilot launched by GitHub a few months back has been of a lot of use for me, recently a thought crossed my mind that made me wonder if Github can beat the hardest of the hardest interview questions.
Backstory
Long story short, I have access to GitHub copilot and I like to do crazy stuff with it, I have asked it to create a lot of things, and most of the time, it works but sometimes it just breaks.
The question
I, as anyone doing this, would do, googled “Hardest Coding Interviews” and found a lot of interesting results.
What I chose:
I found this page to be the best, I decided to read each question and choose the hardest one.
The final questions:
Theory-Based:
- In Python, What Is A Generator?
Code-Based:
- A Square Matrix Of Size N² And Random Entries From 0 … N², Find The Longest Sequence Of Consecutive Neighbors (I.E. Top, Left, Bottom, Right Entries)
- Given An 8x8 Chessboard, Write A Function To Determine How Many Moves It Would Take For A Bishop To Go From A Start Location To An End Location. Then Write A Function To Determine How Spaces It Would Move
Showtime
Theory-Based:
- In Python, What is A generator:
Copilot says:
A generator is a function that returns an object (iterator) that you can iterate over (one value at a time),A generator is a function that returns an iterator.
Google Says:
Python provides a generator to create your own iterator function. A generator is a special type of function which does not return a single value, instead, it returns an iterator object with a sequence of values. In a generator function, a yield statement is used rather than a return statement
👏 Both are the same, it’s just that the explanation Google gave is more detailed than the Copilot, which gave a concise explanation.
Code-Based:
- A Square Matrix Of Size N² And Random Entries From 0 … N², Find The Longest Sequence Of Consecutive Neighbors (I.E. Top, Left, Bottom, Right Entries)
Copilot says:
Let us test and see if this code works.
I am going to enter 2 as the size of matrix and 1,2,3,4 as the numbers when prompted.
👏 This is correct, the Github copilot did it again!
2. Given An 8x8 Chessboard, Write A Function To Determine How Many Moves It Would Take For A Bishop To Go From A Start Location To An End Location. Then Write A Function To Determine How Spaces It Would Move
Copilot Says:
Let us run and see if it works, I am going to run the functions with the start point being [1,1] and endpoint being [7,7], let us see what happens!
I will log the response and show what is the output
I am not a chess player/expert, so I do not know at all if this is correct or not. I think copilot didn’t really understand what we meant and just created a function that does the latter part of the question i.e “Then Write A Function To Determine How Spaces It Would Move” and not the primary.
So I will leave this up to you to decide, did GitHub copilot do it or not?
Conclusion
So there you have it, Github (almost) beat the hardest coding interview tasks!