From: "Simon Kröger" <SimonKroeger@...>
Date: 2007-01-15T04:50:06+09:00
Subject: Re: [QUIZ] Number Spiral (#109)

Dear Ruby Quiz,

this isn't really a solution to the quiz 109 because it violates
some (if not all) of the rules. But as James noted there was a
code golf problem very similar to this quiz and here is my
solution to that.
(see http://codegolf.com/oblongular-number-spirals for detailed
description of the code golf problem)

----------------------------------------------------------------
s,f=1,proc{|x,y|y<1?[]:[[*s...s+=x]]+f[y-1,x].reverse.transpose}
puts f[w=gets(' ').to_i,gets.to_i].map{|i|['%3i']*w*' '%i}
----------------------------------------------------------------

It draws a number spiral, starting with '1' in the upper left
corner and the highest number in the middle, it also features
spirals that are not quadratic.

Yes, you will get some score at the codegolf site if you repost
this solution there - but nowadays you will only get to Rank 9
with this solution and of course you will start to feel ill and
you won't be able to sleep for days and other nasty things might
happen if you do so.

If someone can derive an even shorter solution from this i would
be very interested to see it (the best ruby solution today has 7
bytes less)

cheers

Simon