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Project Euler #912: Where are the Odds?

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Re: Project Euler #912: Where are the Odds?

#11

Post by procparam »

philiplu wrote: post #9
tocs3 wrote: post #3

I have spent a little time with Project Euler. Is it very popular with those here at HN?

It’s my game plan for keeping my brain active in retirement. Been heavily involved for the past 7 years. Been at the 100% solved level since summer 2023, though I’m back to one away the past couple weeks - PE910 is _hard_

Wow. The idea of getting to 100% on PE is almost incomprehensible to me. I've solved basically none outside the first couple pages.

What was your strategy like? How much math background do you have?

Re: Project Euler #912: Where are the Odds?

#16

Post by llm_trw »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #2

The OG LeetCode. Highly recommend, helpful for becoming fluent in a programming language.

I wouldn't. The majority of problems there have mathematical optimizations which real problems never do. Worse if you start thinking in the way those problems encourage you to your programs will be completely invalidated even with a tiny change in the spec.

A good set of questions would be something between the advent of code - where the problems are hard because the spec is so bad on purpose - and project Euler - where the spec is so exact you don't really need a computer to solve the problems with enough thinking.

Something like 'plot the histogram of collatz sequence lengths of the first 100,000 numbers'.

Re: Project Euler #912: Where are the Odds?

#17

Post by guessmyname »

Why problem 912 specifically?

On a side note, I remember when the website got hacked [1][2].

Many people, including myself, migrated to other platforms, but Project Euler problems always remained math-focused compared to the myriad of other websites like LeetCode and HackerRank, among others, listing programming-focused problems, which eventually popularized the use in modern tech interviews.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990221

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/28jp7x/x/

Re: Project Euler #912: Where are the Odds?

#19

Post by Twirrim »

tocs3 wrote: post #3

I have spent a little time with Project Euler. Is it very popular with those here at HN?

I don't know that I'd gauge anything by popularity with the HN crowd. It's also a diverse group. I'm closing in on a hundred problems solved, in a not very completion-ist fashion (I've got a whole bunch of skips and random choices of puzzles).

Maths isn't my strongest suit, and I have no academic comp-sci background, so there's been a number of these I sort of brute force and then go read the answers in the thread; or I brute force the first few integers in the sequence and then try and wrap my head around what https://oeis.org/ is attempting to tell me about them.

It has challenged me a bit on some of my fundamentals with programming, really making me think about efficiency etc.

While I've done most of the problems in rust so far, I've been having to refresh my knowledge of Go recently, so I've started porting answers between the two languages, and it's definitely helping there a bunch.

Re: Project Euler #912: Where are the Odds?

#20

Post by dankwizard »

procparam wrote: post #11
philiplu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s my game plan for keeping my brain active in retirement. Been heavily involved for the past 7 years. Been at the 100% solved level since summer 2023, though I’m back to one away the past couple weeks - PE910 is _hard_

Wow. The idea of getting to 100% on PE is almost incomprehensible to me. I've solved basically none outside the first couple pages. What was your strategy like? How much math background do you have?

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