Collection Of Puzzles For Programmers

http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/All/?p=348

by ycombwin • 14 years ago

118 32 14 years ago

blogs.lessthandot.com

eps• 14 years ago

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.

rauljara2• 14 years ago

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."

Mordio• 14 years ago

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

tripzilch4• 14 years ago

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!

RegEx2• 14 years ago

> "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.

rauljara2• 14 years ago

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.

zohebv• 14 years ago

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

Peteris• 14 years ago

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.

Emouri• 14 years ago

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

energiehund• 14 years ago

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.

bsiemon• 14 years ago

ACM ICPC previous problems are also interesting.

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

the_cat_kittles2• 14 years ago

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.

stan_rogers• 14 years ago

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.

franzus2• 14 years ago

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.

franzus2• 14 years ago

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

yen223• 14 years ago

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

prezjordan• 14 years ago

(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

daveasaurus• 14 years ago

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

Collection Of Puzzles For Programmers

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