The heuristic that lied about the ceiling

The ITA Software hiring puzzles , preserved on the Internet Archive — Sling Blade Runner is among them. Sling Blade Runner asks: how long a chain of overlapping movie titles can you find? The end of one title has to overlap the start of the next — Sling Blade Blade Runner — and each title is used once. You get a list of 6561 titles and a note that heuristic answers are fine, “a reasonable tradeoff…