
Advent of Code 2016 started – daily programming puzzles until Christmas - jschulenklopper
http://adventofcode.com/2016
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jschulenklopper
From the About page: "Advent of Code [created by Eric Wastl - JSc] is a series
of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill levels. They are self-
contained and are just as appropriate for an expert who wants to stay sharp as
they are for a beginner who is just learning to code. Each puzzle calls upon
different skills and has two parts that build on a theme."

I've had great fun with Advent of Code last year, competing with a group of
friends and colleagues. You can set up a private leaderboard for a group, and
watch the progress of the participants.

It can be addicting though. If you attend some social event (dinner, party,
sports game) you fear that your colleagues are passing you on the leaderboard.

~~~
jschulenklopper
A little more explanation on the challenges themselves: The challenges (at
least: the ones in the 2015 edition) are stories in a Christmas setting. The
American version of that, so focussing on some question/problem that Santa
Claus has: how to distribute packages on a sleigh, how many miles to travel
between some cities, how many packages to distribute according to some rule
for brave kids, how much paper and ribbon does it take to wrap a set of
presents.

The programs that you write (if you don't want to solve it by
mathematical/brain powers) focus on things like sorting, combinations,
counting, grids, trees, graphs, other simple data structures around some
fairly basic logic. Nothing too advanced, although sometimes you need to
deploy some smart memoization trick (and take the complexity into account,
O(log n) is better than O(n!) ) to push the execution time down. You want an
answer before Christmas, not before when our Sun expands into a Red Giant. The
programs typically are between 5 and 50 lines of code.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
I still haven't beaten it, because I suck :-(.

Speaking of which, anybody know any good resources for learning algorithms and
datastructures, so I can actually know this stuff?

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qwertyuiop924
This is great. I never finished last year's (because I suck), but I learned a
lot. They say premature optimization is the root of all evil, but it doesn't
really sink in until you optimize for two days, only to realize the naive
solution works fine, and you just wasted a lot of time.

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kriro
I'll give this a whirl but at a slower pace than one/day. Already feeling mild
irritation towards the easter bunny.

