in reply to 2008 Winter Scripting Games have begun

Wow, the advanced division problems really aren't very advanced (turning phone numbers into words was definitely one of the first assigments in CS 101!). I doubt any professional programmers would find these challenging. What's the target age group for the contest?

-sam

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Re^2: 2008 Winter Scripting Games have begun
by Limbic~Region (Chancellor) on Feb 18, 2008 at 02:47 UTC
    samtregar,
    I was discussing this earlier in the CB. This is the first year perl has been included in the competition so perhaps the problems are a bit more challenging in the other scripting languages.

    The only problem I have entered so far is the first event in the advanced category. I asked for clarification on the following words:

    • so-and-so
    • wouldn't
    • woollen&
    • war game
    The response I got was along the lines of - wouldn't would be considered 8 characters, we thought we had eliminated all words with spaces so not sure how war game was missed and woolen& looks like an error with the list.

    This told me they were not placed there intentionally to make the task more difficult. I needed to find some way of making it a bit more challenging so my solution is only 4 lines of code (not golfed) and is probably one of the fastest solutions submitted. Unfortunately, I suspect I will be disqualified. I am not entering any more events until I find out for sure.

    Cheers - L~R

      Wow. Four lines is pretty lean. Is that four statements? Just prompting for a number and reading it back is two, plus printing the result is three and that doesn't count opening the word list file. Or do you mean that the algorithm parts rather than the housekeeping parts are four lines?

      -xdg

      Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is public domain. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.

        xdg,
        Who said anything about opening the word list file?
        1. Obtain all possible solutions through nefarious means 2. Print a line asking for input 3. Get a phone number as input 4. Display the result
        Since I wasn't disqualified, I will wait until after the deadline for event 1 before revealing my solution.

        Cheers - L~R

        But it's a good challenge to think through. Though I ran it against my unix dictionary list, I was able to get it to 5 lines -- not counting strict and warnings. I could see how with a little "do" or "and" trickery or golfing, I could make it 4 or less, but it's not really the point, I guess. (E.g. "say 'Enter number' and my $num = <STDIN>") And as you said, it's very fast.

        Maybe I should enter after all.

        -xdg

        Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is public domain. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.

      Why are you going to be disqualified?

      -sam

        samtregar,
        They made it pretty clear that you needed to make sure your code looked for wordlist.txt in 'C:\Scripts' or it wouldn't work. My solution doesn't use wordlist.txt at all so I thought they might disqualify me. They didn't, so I will probably enter a few more creative solutions to see how that goes.

        Cheers - L~R

Re^2: 2008 Winter Scripting Games have begun
by zentara (Cardinal) on Feb 18, 2008 at 18:29 UTC
    I doubt any professional programmers would find these challenging. What's the target age group for the contest?

    Well with Microsoft, it's all probably part of a marketing strategy, to get your email address, and flood you with deals on buying their super new "Net" IDE. It works well on high school kids. :-)


    I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Cogito ergo sum a bum