The Cult of the Puzzle

How would you move Mt. Fuji?

How do you react when someone asks you a ridiculous question? Raise your eyebrows, laugh out loud, call for the men in white coats? What if the person asking the question happens to be an interviewer for Microsoft and you are a prospective candidate for a job there?

Ask your student(s) "How would you move Mt Fuji?" and await their reaction. Ask them to speculate on who might ask such a question and why?

The purpose of such puzzle questions according to William Poundstone, author of the book: How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle - How the World's Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers (Litte Brown & Company) is to see how people respond to problems that can't be solved, a fundamental challenge in AI.

Here's a link to the book itself with 2 chapters online.

Here's a short film that shows an innovative solution to the problem.

Here's the actual interview tip page on the Microsoft site.

Here are some more riddles.

Discussion question

In Up To Speed, Module 1C we have an interview with a recruitment specialist who might well use such puzzle questions in his screening process. How effective are such puzzle questions in an interview? Are they more or less effective than the usual interview questions?

Here's an extract from slashdot that offers some food for thought.

This makes the effectiveness of these (puzzle) questions an important issue. Poundstone first presents evidence that "Where do you see yourself in five years" and "What are you most proud of" are fairly pointless questions. In one experiment he describes, two trained interviewers conducted interviews with a group of volunteers. Their evaluations were compared to those of another group who saw a fifteen second video of the interview: the candidate entering the room, shaking hands, and sitting down. The opinions correlated strongly; in other words, when you are sitting in an interview telling the interviewer what you do on your day off and what the last book you read was, the interviewer has already made up his or her mind, based on who knows what subjective criteria. As Poundstone laments, "This would be funny if it weren't tragic."