Google Foobar - Invite-only Hiring Challenge

With not much to do over my tenth grade summer, I decided to create my own data compression algorithm out of sheer curiosity in how archival algorithms work. While googling my way through the swamp of not-too-helpful (way-too-complex) examples, the whole google page dropped and revealed a question, ”You’re speaking our language, up for a challenge?” I immediately dropped my pencil, double checked I was awake, and scanned my computer for viruses. “It’s real?” I gasped. Intrigued, I was invited into what I now know as Google’s Foobar hiring challenge, to which me and my family laughed at seeing as I was merely a 10th grader.

The problems were set in a fun mission impossible bunny style setting where I had to solve easy problems like ordering numbers least to greatest in 24 hours. That easy stroll quickly became a mind wrenching nightmare when they asked me to determine the end state of any fictional decomposing ore in 168 hours.

Long story short, after applying every morsel of my tenth grade understanding of probability to no avail, I found that the math modeling this process was called an “Absorbing Markov Chain”. Markov chains led me down a rabbit hole of university worksheets, matrix operations and a mind-blowing connection that assistants like Alexa also use Markov chains.

I tried to understand how Markov chains with their transition matrices worked—but after realizing how much math I lacked and the time constraint, I decided to program in the higher-level math and submit it. I quickly grew frustrated that it was not the coding that held me back, but the lack of the math to even comprehend the foundation of the chains! So after pondering about the problem I just ‘solved’, I decided to start learning the foundation: matrices, even though it was far beyond the scope of even high school math.

That experience churned a certain momentum and passion in me to explore the deepest corners of math and coding, and that same drive has motivated me to eventually (in grade 12) pursue the highest level math that my school has to offer.