Software Interview Questions, Answers for Freshers and Experienced asked in Job Interviews

Imagine you have to write a Tic-Tac-Toe game in which a human player plays against the computer. Discuss the different ways in which you could implement the computer’s artificial intelligence for the game. Which method would you ultimately choose? And why?

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Come up with an algorithm to shuffle a deck of cards. Discuss how uniform a distribution your solution would achieve, and how you could potentially improve upon it.

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How can you determine if a ray intersects a sphere? The more efficient your solution, the better.

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What's the difference between a finite state machine (FSM) and a hierarchical finite state machine (HFSM)? Give an example of a hierarchical state machine with functionality that you could not easily replicate in a non-hierarchical FSM.

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What are some of the limitations of state machines? When is the use of state machines appropriate, and when are they insufficient to generate the kinds of behaviors you need in a game?

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What is a decision tree? When would you want to use one? What are its performance characteristics? How can you generate a decision tree automatically from a pre-existing data set? Is it feasible to do this at runtime, and has it been done in a commercial game before? When and why would you want to do this, and how would the data need to be organized to make this possible?

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You're developing a boss encounter in a 3D platformer game, and the boss has 15 different attacks. The game designers have asked you to make sure that the player sees as many of those 15 attacks as possible during the encounter, and that he seldom or never sees the same attack twice in a row. What are some ways you can do this? What does the attack selection algorithm look like in this case? Keep in mind that not all attacks are possible all the time -- for example, the boss has a melee attack that he can only do when the player is very close, and a bombardment attack he can only do when the player is far away.

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In one room in your game, there's an elevator that AIs will need to use to escape from the player. In order to use the elevator, they have to walk over to a special button on the wall, press it to summon the elevator, then walk into the elevator and press another button to tell it to ascend. How would you design a system to make sure AIs can do all of these things in the proper order? If you have 3 AIs in the room, how would you design the system to make sure they can all escape in the elevator at the same time? What happens if one of them dies while they're trying to do this, and how do you make sure the other AIs don't get stuck waiting for that dead AI?

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You're in charge of implementing a stealth game similar to Thief: The Dark Project, and you need guards in your game that have imperfect vision and hearing and inhabit dimly-lit castles, and they can search the area for the player if they think there's an intruder around. How do you model the sensory systems of these guards, and how do you aggregate auditory, visual, and other kinds of stimuli in this system? How do you implement the various alert states for the guards, and why?

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What is planning? How is it used, and what are its advantages? Is it feasible to use planning in real-time games? If so, name any titles where planning has been used for any part of the AI. Describe the architecture of a planning-based AI system for any genre of game.

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