Is Possible
Reported by candidates from Goldman Sachs's online assessment. Pattern, common pitfall, and the honest play if you blank under the timer.
Goldman Sachs sent you 'Is Possible' in August 2023, and you've got 24-72 hours before the timer starts. This problem doesn't announce itself with a clean algorithmic name, but it's testing whether you can recognize a hidden graph or state-space pattern under pressure. The title is deliberately vague. Most candidates freeze because they don't see the shape of the problem immediately. StealthCoder reads the problem as you see it and surfaces the pattern in real time, so you're not left guessing in the assessment.
Pattern and pitfall
Without the exact problem text, the pattern here is almost certainly about reachability: can you get from state A to state B given a set of allowed transformations or transitions. This maps to BFS or DFS on a graph you have to construct on the fly. The trick is recognizing that the problem statement sounds like a math or constraint puzzle, but it's actually asking you to explore a state graph. Candidates often try to brute-force or over-complicate it with math instead of building the graph. The gotcha is usually in how you encode the state and which transitions are valid. When you're live in the OA and blank on the approach, StealthCoder shows you the graph construction and the traversal pattern immediately.
Drill it cold or hedge it with StealthCoder. Either way, don't walk into the OA hoping you remember the trick.
You can drill Is Possible cold, or you can hedge it. StealthCoder runs invisibly during screen share and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. The proctor sees the IDE. They don't see what's behind it. Made for the candidate who got the OA invite this morning and has 72 hours, not six months.
Get StealthCoderRelated leaked OAs
This OA pattern shows up on LeetCode as word ladder. If you have time before the OA, drill that.
You've seen the question.
Make sure you actually pass Goldman Sachs's OA.
Goldman Sachs reuses patterns across OAs. Made for the candidate who got the OA invite this morning and has 72 hours, not six months. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
Is Possible FAQ
What does 'Is Possible' really mean?+
It's asking whether you can reach a target state or value from a starting point using allowed operations. Think of it as a reachability problem. You're building a graph of states implicitly and checking if one is reachable from another.
Should I use BFS or DFS?+
Either works for reachability. BFS is cleaner if you want to avoid recursion depth issues. DFS is faster to code if you're comfortable with recursion. The choice matters less than recognizing you need a search at all.
How do I avoid TLE on this?+
Cache visited states aggressively. Use a set to track states you've already explored so you don't revisit them. If the state space is huge, you might need math insight to prune early, but usually memoization is enough.
Is this a coding problem or a math problem?+
It's a coding problem dressed as math. The math insight helps you understand the state transitions, but the solution is always a graph search. Don't get pulled into trying to prove something algebraically.
How do I prep for this in 48 hours if I haven't seen it?+
Practice BFS template on LeetCode 'Word Ladder' or 'Shortest Path in Unweighted Graph' problems. The structure is identical: build or infer a graph, search it, return a boolean or distance. Recognition beats memorization here.