Jane Street interview question

Output the random permutation for a given string

Interview Answers

Anonymous

29 Jan 2012

I came up with an O(n) algorithm, but the interviewee asked more

Anonymous

4 Oct 2012

This can be done optimally in O(n) time by iterating over the string, swapping the character at index i with the character at a random index each time.

Anonymous

1 Nov 2017

It's not possible to do asymptotically better than O(n) because on average you'll have to change n-1 of the characters (assuming they're all distinct).