A some point last year I became infatuated with a game commonly known as Flood-It by a company called LabPixies. My obsession resulted in the creation of a clone I call C O L O R F L O W which addresses the major faults I found with the game, namely there was no way […]
Problem #18, find the greatest sum of numbers along a path in a triangle of numbers, looks like a standard tree search problem. However, there’s a note at the bottom stating a brute force method won’t work for a harder/bigger version in problem #67. So I decided to skip the exercise of writing the tree […]
Perhaps this has been going on forever and I’ve only been attuned to it for the last few years. When a high profile public change occurs e.g. new President of the United States takes office, the media likes to make a big deal about what happens during the first 100 days. While it certainly is […]
About a month ago, I came across a post from Jon McLoone on the Wolfram Blog where he detailed his method for finding the 25 best Hangman words. His metric was the percentage of games his computer algorithm would fail to guess a given word. His results make sense; short words with low frequency characters […]
Last month I went on a few training hikes for an upcoming backpacking trip, and on the final two, I took along my GPS. Google Earth provides a wealth of options for visualizing GPS data, but I wanted to get a better understanding of what was going on under the hood. So I exported my […]
Problem #15 Starting in the top left corner in a 20 by 20 grid, how many routes are there to the bottom right corner? I often used this question during interviews and suprisingly, very few candidates were able to make much progress with it. I wasn’t looking for a candidate to code it 100% correctly […]
Problem #12 Find the first triangle number to have over 500 divisors. As I’m progressing through these problems, certain types/sequences of numbers keep popping up. I’ve started a library of functions called eulerLib.py. The first thing I did was add a triangle number generator to my library: def triangleNumber(): num = 1 add = 2 […]
It’s time to get back to discovering how much math and python I’ve forgotten… Problem #9 Find the only Pythagorean triplet (a,b,c where a < b < c and a^2 + b^2 = c^2) where a + b + c = 1000. The first thing I decided to do was figure out some bounds based […]
I took a break from projecteuler to whip up a webOS application before my Tahoe Rim Trail Thru-hike. Upon returning I started skiming some technical books and started playing around with the Facebook Puzzles. In general, starting lots of threads is exciting and gives me the feeling that I am learning a lot; however, I […]
I don’t know anyone (though not doubt they exist) who debates the merits of natural languages and chooses which one to communicate with based on characteristics such as whether they’re fusional vs. agglutinative, but I know plenty of people who discuss the virtues of various computer programming languages and think one is better than the […]
