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I’m going to write about two weird algorithm problems. Those seem quite weired at least to me, yet famous as algorithm questions. One is so-called egg dropping, another is finding a celebrity. I see these two problems here and there. From that, I guess those two are famous algorithm questions. But, at least, those two are quite weird. Some call them puzzle. (Yeah, maybe… I was totally puzzled.)

In my last post, Math Without Operator To Do It, I wrote about division an power implementations. There’s one more of this sort worth adding a memo here. It is calculating a square root without language provided operators.

Do division or power calculation without language provided operators – we see this sort of questions among algorithm problems. I wrote Addtion without +/- operators in the post about XOR related questions. “Divide without division” and “power without its operator or function” are examples as well.

Serialize, Deserialize a binary tree are a popular algorithm questions It depends on a programming language, but in most cases, a binary tree is expressed by an object tree. Each node can have at most two children: left node and right node. Once the binary tree is constructed, it is not language neutral anymore.

As a lisp family language programmer, I used to write a lot of parentheses. Specifically, ( and ). In an algorithm world, parentheses often includes other brackets as well, such as {} or [], but that’s it. At most three types of pairs are there, some problems are much complicated to find a solution. This post is about such problems.