Are you an Oxbridge grade techie?

As well as getting top GCSE and A-Level grades, would-be computer science students applying to Oxford University have to sit a written maths test and undergo at least two interviews as part of what the university terms a "rigorous" selection procedure for its computer science undergrad courses.

But what kind of questions can prospective students expect to be dealt in the interview - often the most feared part of the Oxbridge assessment process?

Interview questions previously used by the university's computer science department include the following problems:

• Death by Chocolate: You are locked in a room with your worst enemy. On a table in the centre of the room is a bar of chocolate, divided into squares in the usual way. One square of the chocolate is painted with a bright green paint that contains a deadly nerve poison. You and your enemy take it in turns to break off one or more squares from the remaining chocolate (along a straight line) and eat them. Whoever is left with the green square must eat it and die in agony. You may look at the bar of chocolate and then decide whether to go first or second. Describe your strategy.

• Tidy Boxes: You are given 10 boxes, each large enough to contain exactly 10 wooden building blocks, and a total of 100 blocks in 10 different colours. There may not be the same number in each colour, so you may not be able to pack the blocks into the boxes in such a way that each box contains only one colour of block. Show that it is possible to do it so that each box contains, at most, two different colours.

• Monkey Beans: An urn contains 23 white beans and 34 black beans. A monkey takes out two beans; if they are the same, he puts a black bean into the urn, and if they are different, he puts in a white bean from a large heap he has next to him. The monkey repeats this procedure until there is only one bean left. What colour is it?

• Missing Numbers: Imagine you are given a list of slightly less than 1,000,000 numbers, all different, and each between 0 and 999,999 inclusive. How could you find (in a reasonable time) a number between 0 and 999,999 that is not on the list?

At Oxford, computer science falls into the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division and candidates can choose to apply for a three-year BA or a four-year Masters in computer science, or mathematics and computer science. The university says it accepts and encourages applications "from candidates who have little or no experience of programming computers".

According to the computer science course description on the university website, the Oxford course "concentrates on bridging theory and practice, including a wide variety of hardware and software technologies and their applications. The course is designed to equip students with the fundamental understanding and practical skills needed by the potential leaders of a demanding profession".

Students keen to get their tech stripes at Oxford will need "a sound understanding of mathematical ideas… both for potential applications such as scientific computation, and for reasoning rigorously about the specification and behaviour of programs". The website adds that practical skills are also important and the majority of course subjects are "linked with practical work".

Think you have the best Death by Chocolate strategy? Post a Reader Comment below outlining your solution…