The question from a DevOps interview

The question was to write a function, which returns Nth element from sequence abacabadabacaba....

I’m curious why they want devops engineer who knows fractals, but here is the link explaining everything about this sequence.

Well, the alghorithm is straighforward enough, imagine N as a binary where each digit represents a character, we will read them starting from right to left. The first digit is b, second - c and so on. a is a letter by default.

jhgfedcba
00000000 a
00000001 b
00000010 a
00000011 c
00000100 a
00000101 b
00000110 a
00000111 d
00001000 a
00001001 b
00001010 a
00001011 c
00001100 a
00001101 b
00001110 a
00001111 e

We remember that we started with a letter and continue moving from left until we reach 0 digit. If current digit is 1 then we replace the char we remembered earlier according to chars in first line.

#include <stdio.h>

#define ABA_LENGTH 400

char aba(int n, char last) {
  if (0 == (n & 0b1) || 0 == n)
    return last;
  return aba(n >> 1, ++last);
}

int main(int argc, char **argv) {

  for (int i = 0; i < ABA_LENGTH; i++) {
    printf("%c", aba(i, 'a'));
  }

  return 0;
}

This way we get a first half of anagram solved. The other part should be easy.