Interview Question: Select a Random Line from a File (in Python)

A cool and useful algorithm explained and extended

By Carl M. Kadie and Christopher Meek

Source: https://openai.com/dall-e-2/

If I (Carl) interviewed you for a job at Microsoft, I probably asked you this question:

How would you select a random line from a text file of unknown length?

I asked this question in Microsoft Research, in the original anti-spam team, and in an Office Machine Learning/Data Science group. We love the question because it touches on probability, algorithms, and systems issues. …

algorithms data science interview line programming python random text-mining