Spreadsheet Formula Engine with Cycle Detection

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This is a medium difficulty Coding & Algorithms question, commonly asked during Technical Screen rounds at Harvey.

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This question is commonly asked for Software Engineer candidates at Harvey during technical interviews.

Question

Spreadsheet Formula Engine with Cycle Detection

PracHub · Accepted Answer

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a stateful data structure that models dependency relationships and lazily propagates updates, a common theme in coding and algorithms interviews. It tests skills in graph traversal, cycle detection, and choosing between eager versus lazy evaluation to optimize for a given read/write workload. This is a practical, implementation-level problem assessing system design intuition within a single class rather than pure theoretical knowledge.

Quick Overview

Spreadsheet Formula Engine with Cycle Detection