AI Agent Intern Technical Questions

Requirements

• Clarify what virtual memory is for and whether a process's virtual address space can be bigger than the installed physical memory.
• Outline the three-way handshake used by TCP and its rationale.
• Given three agents of varying reliability, determine whether precision, recall, or F1 is the right evaluation metric. Connect the decision to the tolerance for false positives versus false negatives.
• Explain how to end-to-end trace a failed or erroneous call to an external tool, covering trace and span IDs, request/response logs, error status codes, and retry strategy.

Notes

• The interview took place in Chinese once the interviewer confirmed language preference; the spoken discussion came before a directed-graph coding task.
• Virtual memory translates process addresses to physical page frames; the address space can be larger than RAM because not every page needs to be in memory at once. Page faults may trigger allocation or on-demand loading, or indicate an illegal access; real memory capacity is still finite.
• The TCP handshake sends SYN, followed by SYN+ACK, then an ACK to align sequence numbers and establish two-way communication. The handshake does not verify the identity of the application.
• Precision equals TP over (TP+FP), recall equals TP over (TP+FN), and F1 is 2TP divided by (2TP+FP+FN). Start by defining the positive class and how to handle a zero denominator. When false positives are expensive, precision is preferred; when false negatives are costly, recall matters more. Evaluate agents on a common labeled dataset, not by a loose trust ordering.
• Track tool invocations through parent and child spans, link cleaned request/response data with failures, and distinguish transient faults from malformed requests. Cap retries and verify idempotency before re-issuing calls that produce side effects.

Preparation

• Within 15 minutes, sketch an address translation diagram and a TCP handshake, then describe a missing page mapping, an invalid memory access, and a dropped handshake packet.
• In 15 minutes, compute precision, recall, and F1 for three confusion matrices and explain which error penalty is more important. Outline a trace of a failing tool call, pinpoint the earliest failing span, and state a safe condition for retrying.