Recipe Manager

Anthropic's "Recipe Manager" interview question focuses on designing an OOP-based system for managing recipes, emphasizing data structures, search, and sorting capabilities. It typically involves implementing a class hierarchy and methods for efficient querying.

Problem Statement

Design a RecipeManager class to store and manage recipes, each with attributes like ID, name, ingredients (list of strings), cuisine type, prep time (minutes), and rating (float 0-5). Support adding recipes, deleting by ID, and advanced search/sorting operations. Use appropriate data structures (e.g., lists, maps, or trees) for efficiency, and demonstrate OOP principles like encapsulation and polymorphism. Constraints prioritize O(log n) or better for search/sort where possible on up to 10^5 recipes.[1][9]

Key Requirements

• Add recipe: Insert with unique ID.
• Delete recipe: By ID.
• Search by ingredient: Return recipes containing exact ingredient substring (case-insensitive).
• Search by cuisine: Filter by type (e.g., "Italian").
• Top rated: Get top K recipes by rating (descending), with optional cuisine filter.
• Sort by prep time: Return all sorted ascending, with time range filter (e.g., 0-30 min).
• Constraints: N ≤ 10^5 recipes; queries up to 10^4; ingredients ≤ 20 per recipe, ≤ 100 chars each; prep time 1-300 min.

Input/Output Examples

Example 1: Adding and Basic Search Input: add(1, "Pasta", ["pasta", "tomato"], "Italian", 20, 4.5) add(2, "Sushi", ["rice", "fish"], "Japanese", 45, 4.8) search_ingredient("pasta") → [1] search_cuisine("Italian") → [1] Example 2: Top Rated with Filter top_rated(1, "Japanese") → [2] top_rated(2) → [2, 1] Example 3: Sorted by Prep Time sort_prep_time(0, 30) → [1] These examples illustrate substring matching for ingredients, exact cuisine match, and stable sorting.[3][5]

Suggested Data Structures

• Main storage: HashMap<ID, Recipe> for O(1) add/delete.
• Ingredient index: HashMap<String, TreeSet<ID>> (sorted by rating/prep) for fast search + sort.
• Cuisine index: HashMap<String, PriorityQueue<Recipe>> (max-heap by rating). This enables efficient operations without full scans.[1]