Computer Scientist
Join a team of extraordinary engineers working on challenging problems that directly benefit millions of travelers. ITA uses the best open source software to build our industry-leading systems. We seek independent people who will define and build new capabilities for our systems, working closely with airlines, travel agents and other customers. We have multiple positions open for talented people with experience in Lisp, C++, Python or Java.
Responsibilities: • Designing and implementing algorithms to make our search and pricing systems more capable and more efficient.
• Abstracting configuration languages from ever-changing customer rules.
• Designing and implementing fast server code to compute information needed by the Search system.
• Interpreting business rules, new taxes, regulations, etc into code.
• Developing and maintaining messaging layers to reliably process real-time data feeds from legacy computing systems.
Qualifications: • Bachelor's degree in computer science or other technical field or equivalent work experience desired. Master's or doctoral degree, or similar experience is a plus for senior positions.
Special Knowledge/Skills Required: • Exceptional programming skills and be willing to code full time; i.e., candidate will take responsibility for implementing finished products based on algorithms developed.
• Demonstrated track record of applying computer science to practical problems (though not necessarily travel or transportation problems).
• Research experience in algorithm design and analysis, machine learning, natural language processing, or related areas is a plus.
• Highly self-directed, a strong individual contributor and a strong team player.
How to Apply
If you are interested in this position, please solve one of the puzzles below and send your solution with your resume to us via this link.
Puzzles:
Please select and solve one of the puzzles below to give us an idea of your problem-solving ability and coding style. Unless otherwise specified, you may use any freely-available language you like. Puzzles submitted in C++, Lisp, Python, Java or Perl will be reviewed most promptly, because those are the languages we use every day; if you choose another language, it may take us longer. No pseudo-code, please! In your submission email, along with your source code, please include your program's final answer; a brief (1-2 paragraph) description of your approach and any trade-offs you made (say, for generality, speed, or ease of implementation); and instructions on how to test your program. In order to ensure that your puzzle solution does not get caught in our mail filters, you should zip the source code file(s) and name the archive "Programming_Puzzle_Submission-NameofthePuzzleyouSolved" e.g. "Programming_Puzzle_Submission-RollYourOwnChatServer.zip".
| BitVector Genealogy |
The BitVectors are an ancient and immortal race of 10,000, each with a 10,000 bit genome. The race evolved from a single individual by the following process: 9,999 times a BitVector chosen at random from amongst the population was cloned using an error-prone process that replicates each bit of the genome with 80% fidelity (any particular bit is flipped from parent to child 20% of the time, independent of other bits).
Write a program to guess the reproductive history of BitVectors from their genetic material. The randomly-ordered file bitvectors-genes.data.gz contains a 10,000 bit line for each individual. Your program's output should be, for each input line, the 0-based line number of that individual's parent, or -1 if it is the progenitor. Balance performance against probability of mistakes as you see fit.
To help you test your program, here is a much smaller 500 x 500 input dataset: bitvectors-genes.data.small.gz, along with its solution file: bitvectors-parents.data.small.
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| Palindromic Pangram |
A palindrome is a sequence of words like "lid off a daffodil" or "shallot ayatollahs" that uses the same letters reading backwards as forwards. The words need not form a meaningful or grammatical sentence.
A palindromic pangram is a multi-word palindrome that includes all 26 letters of the alphabet. Find the shortest sequence of words that is both a pangram and a palindrome. Use this dictionary: WORD.LST (1.66MB). |
| Sling Blade Runner |
"How long a chain of overlapping movie titles, like Sling Blade Runner, can you find?"
Use the following listing of movie titles: MOVIES.LST. Multi-word overlaps, as in "License to Kill a Mockingbird," are allowed. The same title may not be used more than once in a solution. Heuristic solutions that may not always produce the greatest number of titles will be accepted: seek a reasonable tradeoff of efficiency and optimality.
Data provided by MovieLens at the University of Minnesota.
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| The O'Hare Affair |
Objective You want to meet a friend at O'Hare airport at noon and return home the same day. Given a date and an origin airport, find the pair of nonstop flights that gets you to Chicago and home again on that date, minimizing your total time away from home, subject to the constraint that you are at O'Hare at noon.
Details Your program, which must be written in Java, will work by scraping our http://matrix.itasoftware.com website. Create an account on that site called "candidate_YourName" for your program to use. (Please include your name and email address in your registration in case we need to contact you.) Your program should accept two command-line inputs as follows:
java -jar OHareAffair.jar YYYY-MM-DD airportCode
The program should log in to matrix.itasoftware.com with your candidate_YourName account and pose a round-trip query between the given airportCode and O'Hare (ORD), limited to nonstop flights only, using BOS as the sales city, with appropriate date and time constraints. The program should then scan the resulting solution set for solutions that meet the objective specified above. No more than 15 http requests should be made of matrix.itasoftware.com per invocation. Finally, details of the three shortest solutions (breaking ties arbitrarily) should be written out in human-readable form to the console.
For example, for a traveler from Baltimore on July 4th, your program might be invoked as follows:
java -jar OHareAffair.jar 2006-07-04 BWI
Sample output:
Travelling round-trip from BWI to ORD on 2006-07-04:
Trip length: 6:21
Outbound: American Airlines Flight AA3991 (10:03a-11:04a)
Return: United Airlines Flight UA1236 (1:30p-4:24p)
Trip length: 6:39
Outbound: United Airlines Flight UA641 (9:45a-10:47a)
Return: United Airlines Flight UA1236 (1:30p-4:24p)
Trip length: 6:54
Outbound: American Airlines Flight AA3991 (10:03a-11:04a)
Return: American Airlines Flight AA4009 (2:09p-4:57p)
Strive to make your code clean and robust, and to report errors cleanly. Be sure to include your source, any necessary libraries, and instructions on how to run it.
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| Word Numbers |
"If the integers from 1 to 999,999,999 are written as words, sorted alphabetically, and concatenated, what is the 51 billionth letter?"
To be precise: if the integers from 1 to 999,999,999 are expressed in words (omitting spaces, 'and', and punctuation[1]), and sorted alphabetically so that the first six integers are
- eight
- eighteen
- eighteenmillion
- eighteenmillioneight
- eighteenmillioneighteen
- eighteenmillioneighteenthousand
and the last is
then reading top to bottom, left to right, the 28th letter completes the spelling of the integer "eighteenmillion".
The 51 billionth letter also completes the spelling of an integer. Which one, and what is the sum of all the integers to that point?
[1] For example, 911,610,034 is written "ninehundredelevenmillionsixhundredtenthousandthirtyfour"; 500,000,000 is written "fivehundredmillion"; 1,709 is written "onethousandsevenhundrednine". |
| Word Rectangle |
Write a program to find the largest possible rectangle of letters such that every row forms a word (reading left to right) and every column forms a word (reading top to bottom). Words should appear in this dictionary: WORD.LST (1.66MB). Heuristic solutions that may not always produce a provably optimal rectangle will be accepted: seek a reasonable tradeoff of efficiency and optimality.
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