Day 248

[vaskoz]

Good morning! Here's your coding interview problem for today.

This problem was asked by Nvidia.

Find the maximum of two numbers without using any if-else statements, branching, or direct comparisons.

[vaskoz]

A bit-fiddling question.

[vaskoz]

I used this article to understand the math behind the bit manipulation: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/compute-the-minimum-or-maximum-max-of-two-integers-without-branching/

NOTE: The XOR version can't be done without branching in Go since Go doesn't provide integer values for Boolean values.

[vaskoz]

goos: darwin
goarch: amd64
BenchmarkMaxIf-4                 	 2000000	       906 ns/op
BenchmarkMaxSubtractAndShift-4   	 3000000	       494 ns/op
BenchmarkMaxXor-4                	 2000000	      1027 ns/op