The interviewer was reasonably congenial. Since it was a phone interview, I did not know the interviewer. It was not very clear from the interviewer's side what kind of answers he wanted. I could understand that he was in a hurry, and since it was a telephonic screening, it became all the more difficult to understand and appreciate what the interviewer wanted. He appeared to have a set answer and was interested in something very similar.

1. Given a dictionary of strings and another string, find out if the string is an exact match to some words in the dictionary or if it varies at most in only one place of some word in the dictionary.

2. Given a log of length n and T markings on the log which are non-uniform, how will you cut the log at every marking so that the cost of the T cuts is minimized? The cost of the cut at each of the T markings is proportional to the length of the marking from one edge.