31–40 of 124 posts
This is my first year. As I missed the start time I created an event to remind me and published it for anyone else who'd wish to subscribe. https://calendar.google.com/event?action=TEMPLATE&tmeid=M203... Looking forward to the fun, the stress and the eventual euphoria.
These are daily programming puzzles? How long do they take on average? Also, I know somebody who is just starting out at coding. Would it be too hard for them? They are brand new, learning about loops
The first few problems are approachable by pretty much anyone who understands how to do arithmetic, file I/O and basic flow control. Many of the later problems require advanced skills such as more sophisticated algorithms (graph theory, dynamic programming, etc.), reverse engineering, and careful debugging.
For what it's worth, I would expect anyone who knows what a loop is to be able to get the first half of today's problem without much difficulty. The second half is a bit less trivial but also pretty easy to understand.
These are daily programming puzzles? How long do they take on average? Also, I know somebody who is just starting out at coding. Would it be too hard for them? They are brand new, learning about loops
Every day's puzzle has two parts. The first part is usually easy. The second part is then a twist that requires a change to the solution of the first part.
Apart from that, you can always skip a day if you just can't solve it. The exception is that sometimes a puzzle can reference the solution of an older day, so if you'd solved the older day you would already have an understanding of how to proceed, and might be able to reuse some code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It rounds down the quotient
How intuitive. But thanks anyway.
Thus for Python 3 the new // operator was added for explicit floor division (which is often quite useful in its own right), leaving the / operator to always return an exact (to machine precision) floating point result, even with integer arguments.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...
These are daily programming puzzles? How long do they take on average? Also, I know somebody who is just starting out at coding. Would it be too hard for them? They are brand new, learning about loops
First couple of tasks are really easy, but difficulty increases over time and so does time needed to solve them.
Someone who is currently learning about loops might not be able to solve these on their own, but with someone else's help they might learn lots of useful concepts (e.g. linked lists, bfs, basic asm, how to code efficiently...) and try to apply them.
AoC are solving usually those who are quite familiar with programming and want to learn a new language or to compete with colleagues.
After seeing the problem [0], I didn't immediately think to use oeis because the manhatten distance of a spiral is pretty easy to code or do by hand. The second stage has a harder sequence though. It prompted me to check oeis and I easily got the answer [2] within a minute of checking.
Looking back at the first stage, I found a sequence for it [1] and PARI/GP code i could run to answer the question. If I had used oeis immediately I would have a solution to both phases in 2 minutes which would be the fastest on the old leaderboard for the problem [3].
These are daily programming puzzles? How long do they take on average? Also, I know somebody who is just starting out at coding. Would it be too hard for them? They are brand new, learning about loops
These are daily programming puzzles? How long do they take on average? Also, I know somebody who is just starting out at coding. Would it be too hard for them? They are brand new, learning about loops
In general the puzzles involve basic operations that any language would have. Functions, data structures, recursion, some amount of back-and-forth between strings and numbers and records. There isn't any reliance on library-like things like making HTTP requests or parsing complex file formats. I think they would be fine for someone starting out at coding. Every day's puzzle has two parts. The first part is usually ea…
The earlier ones, perhaps, but professional programmers struggle with the later ones. I’d never suggest that some one new to programming tries to do all of AoC.
These are daily programming puzzles? How long do they take on average? Also, I know somebody who is just starting out at coding. Would it be too hard for them? They are brand new, learning about loops
I haven't done it since 2017, and I was pretty quick (made that year's overall leaderboard), but on average they took me about 23 minutes (for both parts).