Kevin-s puzzles and other matters
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Dear Friends and Colleagues!
Please sorry for there are not many problems from me (RG) recently, but let me show and tell you something curious! :)
Behold, almost 30 problems here - ready to be tried!
Our colleague Kevin aka moxieman since he brought to us the first puzzle of his own - he obviously get taste in this business and started proposing more and more, and I'm afraid I soon get confused and missed some of his proposals.
On the other hand, when the the "opensource" version of CA was published even its first and lame implementation, Kevin
went on to try deploying it and seemingly initially used it as a test-ground for data setter/checker code - but by now
there are quite a number problems already - and one of our colleagues aszaloki already had tried some of them!
Won't you join? As you may see in the discussion below, some puzzles are quite a nuts to be cracked!
Besides this, due to some recent efforts, "opensource" version got some updates - forum, profile configuration, messhall and a number of subtle customization settings and features. Soon I'll apply them to the physics' site mentioned recently and perhaps will use for something else.
Also, sandbox was slightly updated so your sources now could be run with slightly higher versions of compilers and
interpreters. Additionally Go (quite fresh, 1.23.0) was added and also BCPL. The latter may seem queer, but that's
how it happened. I'm currently slowly looking for a new job (my "current stack" is in Go) and preparing to interviews
I went to Wikipedia to read a bit more about Go history. I found name of Ken Thompson among language designers and
valuely recollected he was behind some C initiatives back in 1970s. I was intrigued and read more, to learn that
Ken really was creating B, the predecessor of C, which was int turn initially just typed version of B created
by Dennis Ritchie. Now B has its own predecessor, BCPL - and its author Martin Richards left curious book
about the language and its compiler, which may be useful for those studying compilers designs - as he employed the
idea of compiling to intermediate code which is then compiled to native code (now seemingly this approach is very popular).
Hi all!
Thank you Rodion for the very kind introduction of my humble website! This project has been a very fun way to learn web dev, and so
I'm very humbled and thankful that you've made all of this available.
If anybody does check out the site then I do hope you enjoy. I do plan to add more varied problems from my experience in addition to the coding-concept ones here, especially those related to calculus, music, chemistry, and engineering concepts. And I'm always open to any feedback or suggestions, if anybody wishes to share their opinions!
I spent a couple hours on "Deranged Goat" which looked promising to me until I found myself in need of calculating combinations for 5-digit values... Probably I'm doing something wrong :)
Had better luck with manometers problem which despite lengthy explanation obviosly needs very simple formula in a loop, which actually could be guessed rather than thoughtfully crafted, especially given those funny imperial units. It reminds of the puzzles I sometimes found in old books about arshyns, altyns, puds, dengas, vershki etc :)
Overall I feel I know now where to come to rehabilitate my quite forgotten school math!
Hi Rodion! I'm somewhat pleased with the Deranged Goats problem - there is probably a bit of insight into the nature of the problem that is needed to solve the larger testcases. There is a slight hint in the title, but it might take a bit of digging to uncover what's needed for an efficient solution.
The follow-up problem A Deranged Gamble is actually the easier of the two, despite the initially-frightening testcases. It shouldn't take too much tapping before suddenly breaking :)
And I'm glad you enjoyed the Differential Manometers problem! I can recall doing these exact type of problems in first-semester Chemical Engineering courses. These were good "warm-up" problems to get familiar with force balances and fluids before capping off one end of the tube and involving the gas compressibility. Like with these Goethe Barometers, for example. And using those funny imperial units is often a daily practice for American engineers... Things can really get fun if equipment gets sourced from multiple vendors and so you can end up with both metric and multiple imperial systems co-mingling in the same process :D
