It's pretty interesting how close this assignment looks to demoscene [1] golf [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_golf
It even uses Chrome tracing tools for profiling, which is pretty cool: https://github.com/anthropics/original_performance_takehome/...
it's designed to select for people who can be trusted to manually write ptx :-)