Google 2026 New Grad R1: Determine Whether Two Chickens Are Blood Relatives

Role: Software Engineer, New Grad
Result: Final outcome not disclosed
Report time: January 2026

Coding: blood relationship in a chicken family graph

For every chicken, parent-child relationships are known. Given two chickens, determine whether they have a blood relationship.

The candidate initially treated the structure as an undirected connectivity problem. An interviewer example exposed the flaw: two parents can be in the same connected component through their child without being blood relatives to each other.

The candidate then reframed the task around common ancestry. Follow-up comments clarified that the intended approach is to walk parent relationships and check whether the two ancestor sets intersect.

The interviewer did not prescribe an input format; the candidate had to design the data structures and function signature.

Practice: Determine Whether Two Chickens Are Blood Relatives

The report emphasizes clarifying the relationship definition and edge cases before starting implementation.