Whoever agrees to do LC problems during interview has zero dignity.

Would love to know how to actually assess the runtime complexity of constraint solvers like this.

It's insane how many of these new "AI" companies don't let you use AI or even your own IDE for coding interviews. And most questions from such companies are LC type problems so they know any AI tool can one shot it.

> Given an array of integers heights representing the histogram's bar height where the width of each bar is 1, return the area of the largest rectangle in the histogram.

Maybe it's my graphics programmer brain firing on all cylinders, but isn't this just a linear scan, maintaining a list of open rectangles?

Nice post, I wasn't aware that there were so many dedicated constraint solving systems.

I tried a couple of times long time ago to solve them with cp/integer programming.

The interviewers were clueless so after 10 minutes of trying to explain to them I quit and fell back to just writing the freaking algo they were expecting to see.

So LeetCode has fallen into the same trap as ProjectEuler (anyone remember that?)

Use the right tool for the right job!

My beef with someone using a constraint solver here is that they almost certainly wouldn't be able to guarantee anything about their solution other than that, if it produces an output, it will be correct. They won't be able to guarantee running time, space usage, or (probably for most tools) even a useful progress indicator. The problem isn't merely that they used another tool - the problem is that they abstracted away critical details. Had they provided a handwritten solution from scratch with the same characteristics, it would've exhibited the same problems.

This doesn't mean they can't provide a constraint solver solution, but if they do, they'd better be prepared to address the obvious follow-ups. If they're prepared to give an efficient solution afterward in the time left, then more power to them.