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Normalize a Vector (L2) is a easy coding interview question covering math, machine learning — the kind asked at FAANG (Facebook/Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and AI-first companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia.
Implement L2 normalization (unit vector). A normalized vector has magnitude 1 and preserves direction.
normalize(v) = v / ||v||_2
Used before computing cosine similarity and as a preprocessing step in many ML pipelines.
Example: [3, 4] -> [0.6, 0.8] (since ||[3,4]||=5)
Return the zero vector unchanged if the input is all zeros.
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