I did a lot of these when I was around 15-16 and it solidified for me my interest in CS but in general abstract thinking and problem solving. Great site.
Project Euler
41–50 of 142 posts
Re: Project Euler
#42How I learnt about prime number sieves.
Good prep for Advent of Code in 2 weeks.
Re: Project Euler
#43Ha! I did a lot of these around 2007-2008. I solved the first 100 or so ones. Solving these were more fun than any other programming problems site I've seen. I quit it when I realized I was spending 4+ hours per problem - I couldn't justify the time. Beyond a certain point, most required some knowledge of elementary number theory.
Same timeline for me! This was my great procrastination side quest during grad school. I learned haskell and a bit of ocaml working on these. Functional languages are extremely well suited to these kinds of problems.
Re: Project Euler
#44I learned so much from this site- including that so much education comes from being prompted to ask the right questions.
Re: Project Euler
#45[deleted]
Re: Project Euler
#46I wrote Problem 619 (https://projecteuler.net/problem=619) which was published on 2018-01-27 and solved by 474.
The problem was based on 2013 Putnam Exam problem A2 (https://kskedlaya.org/putnam-archive/2013.pdf) which I took at the end of undergrad.
I got an email six years later (in November 2024) telling me they accepted the problem:
Greetings!
Please excuse the email. It's quite possible that you are no longer active at Project Euler, but we are currently trying to retrospectively acknowledge contributors of problems.
You were identified as being involved with Square subsets [619 m] in Sep-17.
If you would like to be added as a verified contributor, please reply to this email and provide the username you currently use at projecteuler.net. Please note that contributor usernames will not appear publicly, rather they will be used internally to unlock new contributor awards we are introducing.
Regards,
Project Euler Team
Re: Project Euler
#47No one tells you that they delete inactive accounts. I used to have over 300 solved problems htere. Now it is all gone, all the effort, but the skill remained of course.
Re: Project Euler
#48[deleted]
Re: Project Euler
#49i was a euler fanatic some years ago reaching problems in the 500s albeit, skipping problems along the way. at that point, too many problems required a deeper math background than i possessed so i abandoned it. what amazed me was that others composed solutions that solved problems in mere milliseconds that brute force approaches would still be running when the universe cooled to absolute zero.
I only reached the 100s back in the day. What amazed me was that it seemed like every problem had a paper solution, when it would take any computer algorithm thousands or millions of computations to solve the same problem.
I played around with some of the easier problems, my favorite was a couple times when starting with the obvious brute force solution in code and then refactoring and simplifying it iteratively ended up getting me the paper solution.
Re: Project Euler
#50No one tells you that they delete inactive accounts. I used to have over 300 solved problems htere. Now it is all gone, all the effort, but the skill remained of course.
A few years back (10 maybe?) they had a disk crash, and there was a notice that for people with 100 or more problems solved they'd do an extra effort to recover their solutions and add you back, not sure if it was only posted on the main website. I was lucky to get my account back at the time