Arrays, Binary Search & DP

Classic array problems show up in Intel's general panel and in its AI software interviews, at the same easy-to-medium level as the rest of Intel's coding. A sliding-window sum has come up in a Gaudi interview, and a matrix search in a medium round. Fibonacci appears too, first recursive and then as dynamic programming. It's one of only two DP questions Intel is known to ask, and its best-known form is a staircase count.

What's different at Intel is the follow-up. A quadratic window scan gets accepted, and then the interviewer asks for a linear one. A memoized Fibonacci gets a question about how much stack it uses. Interviewers look at space and memory layout the way a firmware reviewer would, so the best answers keep two indices or two variables and read memory in the order it's stored.

The Intel angle

Say what the first version costs before you write the better one. Intel scores efficiency right after correctness, and interviewers follow your path up from brute force. For the staircase, explain why plain recursion blows up and how little depth a firmware stack has, then shrink it to two variables. For the window, explain that the scan is quadratic because it restarts at every index, then show each element entering and leaving the window once. These rounds usually go from the obvious version to the efficient one, explained out loud.

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