Collection Of Puzzles For Programmers | Hacker News Reader

Collection Of Puzzles For Programmers

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118 pointsycombwin32 comments

Obligatory Project Euler plug whenever anyone posts a collection of puzzles for programmers. http://projecteuler.net

These sorts of puzzles are great for when learning a new language. Take a bunch of problems you've already solved in one language, and see how the solution works in another. If the solutions are too similar, it may be a sign that you aren't quite grokking yet how to think in the new language. Or that the new language is very similar to the old one. In which case, perhaps it would be more worth your time to learn a more different language. As Perlis said, "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing."

I also like the Python Challenge: http://www.pythonchallenge.com/

oh I like how they get harder quickly and are not just about math and string/number/list manipulation like most puzzle sites. They make you delve into python (of course I used `requests` instead of the suggested `urllib` for problem 4) and have some very nice (but so far not too hard) riddle elements!

... And I just finished problem 5. very cool!

sorry for the double post, but seriously these challenges are some of the most original I've seen!

it reminds me a bit of +Malattia's 3564020356.org website. although those are sometimes quite a bit "reversing" (reverse engineering/cracking/code=data) oriented and (IMO) get pretty hard. Of course I don't know how complex these pythonchallenges are going to become, but most of +Malattia's levels require a couple of hours or to be solved over days. You can solve the first few without programming skills, although they do help :) I forget how far I came with these, maybe level 6 or 7. Seems he lost accounts made before 2006, so I can't check for sure.

The site itself is pretty old (10 years, at least), so any hints that refer to external web resources/material might be long dead, and you either have to use archive.org or accept the additional challenge of finding other mirrors (I'm fairly confident most stuff must have been mirrored in some dusty corner of the web, since the "scene" that's behind these challenges were not so much "reversers" as they are "+seekers") (try googling for filenames, and such).

Good luck! (those who are up for it ;-) )

> "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing"

Makes a good quote, but I don't buy it from a practical perspective. Library support is my primary motivation in choosing which scripting language to use for work projects. I don't think much differently at all in Ruby than in Python, but knowing both is extremely helpful.

I mostly agree with you in that there are perfectly valid reasons for learning similar languages. The quote is too strong, too absolute. But I still have a weakness for the quote because learning languages that alter your thinking is so much more useful than learning ones that don't.

As to ruby/python, I only have a superficial knowledge of Python, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that ruby blocks let you do thinks you can't in python. Rspec is one of the examples that gets talked about a lot. But if I were asked to sum all the numbers divisible by both 3 and 5 between 1 and 100 in Ruby, I'd do it like this

  (1..100).select{|a| a % 3 == 0}.select{|a| a % 5 == 0}.inject(&:+)

In my mind, that is a completely different way of solving the problem than by running a loop. My understanding is that you can't really do something like that conveniently in Python. Though, like I said, I really don't know python, so please do correct me if I have that wrong.

  sum([x for x in xrange(1, 101) if x % 3 == 0 and x % 5 == 0])

edit: actually sum the list. Of course, it's even shorter if you realize you can write it as:

  sum([x for x in xrange(1, 101) if x % 15 == 0])

You're better off making that a generator:

sum((x for x in xrange(1, 101) if x % 3 == 0 and x % 5 == 0))

Notice the parenthesis instead of square brackets. Your version actually creates a list in memory. A generator generates the items one by one and doesn't need to store them all at the same time.

You can just write it as

  sum(x for x in xrange(1,101) if x % 3 == 0 and x % 5 == 0)

and skip the inner set of parenthesis; the parenthesis on a generator expression are not needed if it is the only argument to a function.

Can't you all think for a bit? All of These solutions are O (n) in both time and space... there is solution that will take O (1) time and space - and I think that you learned it in math class at (latest) high school (hint: arithmetic progression)

Seriously? The discussion is about language features, not optimal algorithms.

One could imagine the question was actually "sum BusyBeaver(n) for n divisible by 3 and 5 between 1 and 100", i.e. no closed form. In Python:

  sum(BusyBeaver(x) for x in xrange(1,101) if x % 3 == 0 and x % 5 == 0)

(And yes, if one was being really pedantic, one could replace the condition with x % 15 == 0.)

The thing is that people start using those libraries w/o thinking before - and theirs' solutions end up doing much more work than is needed

This could be said of most anything high level.

true, but xrange(1,101) is so tiny, who cares!

Despite the answers provided by fellow HNers, even if there wasn't a loop-less way to handle the scenario in Python, I assert that taking advantage of a language feature doesn't necessarily equate to "altering your thinking". You may find yourself, though, altering your thinking after defining language features have accumulated to a certain degree.

I agree, the quote is more applicable to conceptually very different languages (e.g. Lisp, Forth, and Smalltalk) than to clever features of particular languages.

Or in javascript..

  new Array(100).join(1).split(1)
    .map((function() { var i = 0; return function() {return ++i;}})())
    .filter(function(x) { return !(x % 15); })
    .reduce(function(x, a) { return a += x; }, 0);

Some examples

1. Purely declarative animations in a general purpose language http://conal.net/fran/tutorial.htm

2. A recursive descent parser where you can declare your grammar as in yacc i.e. it is not a separate compiler generator but a regular library, and the code is type safe unlike yacc. The best part is that the actual library is just 2 lines of code, thanks to the magic of lazy evaluation and a powerful type system.

result v = \inp -> [(v,inp)]

p `bind` f = \inp -> concat [f v out | (v,out) <- p inp]

http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/237/1/monparsing.pdf

As you point out, Project Euler and other simple puzzles are good for picking up new languages. Of course, Euler actually has a broad set of tough problems, but many people prefer solving the first tenner using one-liners.

It's slightly vintage now, but there is nothing better for getting actual algorithmic problem solving ability per time invested than USACO at http://train.usaco.org/usacogate. It was developed by the US high school competitive programming coaches. If you can plow your way through the first couple of sections, even the toughest interview questions will seem easy.

Serious.

I recommend the 250 points and 500 points problems of topcoder(http://www.topcoder.com/). Some of the classical puzzles are so straightforward, while more effort is needed to find the tricks of the problems on topcoder.

I seem to recall there being a subreddit filled with these kind of puzzles, but I can't find it right now. Anybody know the one I'm talking about?

edit: this was the one I was thinking about http://www.reddit.com/r/dailyprogrammer

I have never understood the desire or need for these. Why not tackle whatever problems are in the way of what you are trying to make? I guess some people like them for their own sake, but I haven't ever felt that way.

Some of these, at least, are excellent ways of learning how to think about a solution to a problem. Take the Friday the 13th puzzle for instance -- you can do a lot of floundering around with a puzzle like that in some languages until you realise that it's exactly equivalent to looking for all of the Sunday the 1st dates, and it's been a long time since I worked in any language that didn't have an easy way to do that. Sure, some puzzles are just puzzles for the sake of cleverness (the typical "think outside the box" things), but others are about decomposing or restating a problem to make it much simpler that a frontal assault on the original problem as stated. If you're the sort that can immediately intuit the decomposed problem all of the time, cool -- most people need to train their minds to work that way.

Start writing a game. You will learn a lot more from the problems you have to solve for your game than from a dozen project euler websites.

Yep, I too don't understand the fascination with puzzles. I love solving real problems but I hate those idiotic puzzles.

I too do not know why people like things that I hate.

For real? It's called empathy. Try it some time, it's like telepathy, but easier.

er, sorry. that was meant as a joke but probably sounded a bit harsher than i intended.

ACM ICPC previous problems are also interesting.

http://icpc.baylor.edu/info/Problem+Resources

(plug) For a little while I tried to make some "practical" puzzles for new programmers [0], but with school and work I've found excuses to not work on it. I also began rewriting the site in Ruby on Rails so I could leave Wordpress, but, for the same reasons, I haven't worked on it in quite some time.

[0]: http://programthis.net

The website http://programmingpraxis.com has a ton of interesting puzzles.

For beginner programmers, though some of these make good questions for an interview. We used Roman number converter question few times and it's an unboring exercise.

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