From: Paul Smith Date: 2009-10-05T21:27:30+09:00 Subject: Re: what do you enjoy in a ruby quiz? For what it's worth, I really enjoyed the Google codejam this year, but I've never participated in the Ruby Quiz (though I did buy the 'best of' book) Codejam did it for me because it forced me to timetable in a 2hr slot to work on a few problems, as the rounds were time limited. That's not a direction I'm expecting Ruby Quiz to take, but it is what attracted me to the Codejam. However, I really loved the problems too - they read very simply, and it's often easy to come up with a naive solution that won't work on large inputs due to algorithm complexity, so you must refine that answer to get the best performance out of your program. People mentioned games - one of the Round 2 problems this year involved a digging and falling game that could be quite fun - the question actually posed was to find the minimum number of digs to complete the level. However, actually coding the game could be just as much fun (and would give me an excuse to actually learn something about rubygame). Another problem involved calculating the probability for an animal to be cute based on parsing a cuteness probability tree. I'd love to see this one done in Ruby because the problem sounds like it plays to Ruby's strengths big time. So, my 2 suggestions: 1) re-use some of the google codejam problems 2) Try to graduate the problems by using some constraints that make a naive solution work, then relaxing those constraints so the expert programmers get a tougher nut to crack. Another good example of point 2 - in one round we were asked to calculate the minimum power of a sprinkler such that any 2 sprinklers would cover every plant in a greenhouse with water. Easy: Given a fixed sprinkler size, determine if the sprinkler covers the 3 plants in a given greenhouse Normal: Determine the minimum sprinkler size that could cover all 3 plants in a given greenhouse Hard: Determine the minimum sprinkler size that could cover up to 40 plants in a given greenhouse These are all related problems of course - but the easy one should be simple enough for most people to handle. The normal one uses a simple case - with 3 plants the number of sprinkler positions to test is small and manageable. With 40 plants the problem is much harder. On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 12:43 PM, jonty wrote: > First thankyou for continuing with the quiz! > > I find that most of the puzzles are too difficult for me to start on, > although once some pointers have been posted i can usually make a start and > make progress. > > What I am getting out of it at the moment is learning from others who do > post solutions. > > The issue for me is that I seem to be competing with some very impressive > programmers. > > I would appreciate a mixture of some simple quizzes that allow me to > participate well but not ignoring the needs of the more expert so putting in > some quite challenging ones. Whether they are algorithm or real world I > don't think is the issue, except that real world problems might need the > additional step of abstraction. > > I agree with Harry Kakueki, some easier ones for me! > -- Paul Smith http://www.nomadicfun.co.uk paul@pollyandpaul.co.uk