Google Treasure Hunt 2008

treasurehunt.appspot.com

3 points·antiform··11 comments

"Unfortunately, your answer was not correct. Try again landlubber! There will more questions over the coming weeks, and the first person to answer them all correctly will win a prize, so keep trying!"

Am I missing something? It looks have no chance at the prize now but they want me to keep trying? For what? Self flagellation?

Since they seem to only have a couple problems up, you can keep trying until you get it, and try to be quicker on the next problems. Or just do it for fun, like problems on Project Euler (www.projecteuler.net for those that don't know).

It's legit, the Official Google Blog links to it:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-treasure-hunt-...

It would be have been easy to setup a phishing site since anybody in the beta can host something on appspot.com

ugh, i got the path problem, whats the answer for that one?

Let m and n be x-1 and y-1. Then the answer is simply (m+n)!/(m!n!).

Depends on the size of the grid :)

Its a 7 * 3 grid for me, I answered 49 :-( now I'm anxious!

You got lucky. Mine was 66x36. I wasted a lot of time googling for a copy of pascal's triangle with 100 rows and eventually gave up and learned how to get big integer support in perl. So, I guess I'm happy I didn't get such a trivial question.

The size shouldn't matter once you have a good algorithm for solving it :)

Well, I could do his in my head. Actually, no, I have that one memorized.

I had a perfectly good algorithm. It was a memoized recursion. The problem was that my program printed something like blah*10^27 and they were asking for an exact answer.

Are you sure? The first grid I got was more like 38 * 53. The picture is not the actual grid problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com