I’ve been watching cryptography videos again on Khan Academy. In doing so, I created this puzzle. But don’t worry about it. It’s really hard, even with the hints I provide.
Tag Archives: challenge
A really challenging puzzle – even with hints
Fifty
The fifty word story challenge.
Thanks for the inspiration, Regina.
It Came From Under the Bed
His breath held painfully as fretful fingers climbed the bedstand lamp for the switch. Below, old homework papers crunched slowly. Ominously.
“Skipper…?” The dog’s name was little more than a slow exhale.
“Please be Skipper.”
Pffffffffft
He gagged on the warm, unlikely relief of dog fart.
A Quotation Challenge
In the interim between the Fall and Spring semesters, I’ve been letting the WordPress 365 Days of Writing Prompts to guide my posts. Today’s prompt asks us to consider a quote that you come back to again and again – and consider why it moves you.
Although I don’t think that I’ve kept this quote specifically on my mind, it is one that I consider close to my heart. Perhaps I’ll come back and comment later about what this means to me, so long as some of you share first.
The quote:
“A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.”
Take a moment to think about who you think might have said this before clicking here to find out. While you’re at it, let me know what it means to you and who you thought it was if you didn’t get it right.
New Coding Challenge – The Quincunx!
The Quincunx – A triangular pegboard that will create a nice normal distribution as balls are dropped from the top and bounce down randomly over the triangular array of pegs.
Society’s greatest achievement, The Price Is Right, demonstrates the use of a plinko board in this video with the most excited player ever.
The coding challenge is to design a quincunx that demonstrates each of the following four points… No animation is required, simply (1)show the board as an array of X’s with a (2) user-determined number of rows (1-20) and the (3)resulting bins filling with integers as a (4)user-determined number of balls (1-100,000) is dropped. This time, I’m awarding prizes to the cleanest, most clearly documented entries in each language represented on Codecademy (Ruby, JS, Python).
As always, the prizes are bragging rights, presentation of your code on my blog with full attribution to you and a promo copy of any of my eBooks on iPad for you to share with the youngster in your life (or keep yourself). Each of my books presents educational material in the form of a story (Heracles and the Gas Laws, Sisyphus and the Laws of Motion, Zombies and Fractions).
Happy Coding!
(submit your entries as links in the comments below)
Winding down Coding Challenge I
I’ve received several entries answering my coding challenge to demonstrate / test Goldbach’s Conjecture that all even numbers > 4 are the sum of two primes. So far python has been the language of choice for entries.
I will be closing down this challenge as of June 30 at 11:59pm.
Once I take a look at the entries, I’ll award the prize, a copy of my iBook, In Parts to the winner and post the code here with a walkthrough to show how the problem was tackled as well as any interesting comparisons between entrants.
Coding Challenge II: Make Mine a MASTERmind
Don’t worry, Coding Challenge I is still open, but someone was writing about games to develop in the codecademy discussion groups.
A while ago, when I was first following the JavaScript pathway, there, I decided to write a MasterMind program. Many of the versions I saw prohibited players from using the same number/color more than once, but I felt that was a cop-out. My solution works, but as usual for me, had some tortuous logic.
So, here’s the challenge:
In any language, write a MasterMind game where the computer chooses the numbers and the user deduces them.
1. use numbers (four of them,#s1-4, randomly chosen by the computer), rather than colors
2. that allows multiple uses of the same numbers, i.e. ‘1122’
3. provides appropriate feedback to the user to help them close in on the correct sequence.
4. keeps track of the number of turns taken
5. (optional) can also be played with 2 users -or- user sets the code and computer guesses
6. (optional) allow user to select # of positions and range of numbers used.
simple code trumps tangly code. I prefer languages I can read (C++, javascript, python) but all are welcome.
DownHouseSoftware 