After completing my first challenge, I was given a slightly harder second challenge - the famous Interval Scheduling Problem.

• Input is a list of start and end times, e.g. [[1,2][3,4], ... ]
• The times are between 1 and 1000000, and there are never more than 100 appointments.
• You must create a function where the return value must equal the maximum number of appointments that can be scheduled
• I was given three days to complete the task

# If at first you don’t succeed …

I decided to try to solve the puzzle without looking up the right answer. I first thought that because the number of appointments was limited by the conflicts, and a graph was a good data structure to represent conflicts, that a graph based approach might be fruitful. I quickly made simple Node and Graph data structures, and tested it out. It worked on some of the tests provided by google, but not all of them.

# Try again

As I was debugging, I began to think that this had to be an over-complicated solution to the problem. I went to Wikipedia and found that the much simpler “Earliest Finishing Time” algorithm was the optimal solution:

• Sort the intervals by earliest finishing time
• Accept each interval of it doesn’t conflict with the previously accepted intervals

This took only a few minutes to implement and passed the tests on the Foobar website. You can even prove the correctness of this algorithm by using a charging argument.

# The anti-climactic finish

After Google accepted my answer, I was notified that I was halfway done with Level 2. I typed “request” into the command line on the site …

And that was the end of my Foobar adventure. No warning. No explanation. No closure.