Music Player Shuffle vs Random Mode Detection

Problem Overview

An offline music player has a playlist of songs and two playback modes: • Random mode: At each step, picks the next song uniformly at random from the entire playlist with replacement (the same song can appear back-to-back). • Shuffle mode (iPod-style): The player randomly permutes the entire playlist so…

• 3 candidate-reported follow-ups — the exact probes interviewers asked, with the trigger for each
• The rest of the problem statement — full requirements, constraints, and edge cases
• Approach and trade-offs — what passing candidates did, and the mistakes that sink people