Depth-first Recursion with AI in 103 Seconds

Once, when I was interviewing with the iTunes U team at Apple, I was asked to write a depth-first search, using recursion, in a language of my choice. I chose Java and proceeded to sketch out a tree on the whiteboard while keeping track of my stack on the side of the board.

It took about 10 or 15 minutes. Then the hiring manager and I walked though the code and I was thrilled that I passed, especially since recursion is not my strongest area of coding.

Today, I used ChatGPT which was released eight days ago. It came up with three different solutions in less than two minutes. This is fascinating.