Category coding challenge

• Problem of the week #7 - Team Tic-Tac-Toe - USACO 2018 US Open Contest, Bronze

  Still on my Learn to Code by Solving Problems binge, and I found this problem quite interesting, so I decided to share my solution and thought process behind it.
  The USACO Tic-Tac-Toe problem is a variation of the classic game, with cows claiming squares and competing for victories individually or as pairs. The full text can be found here

  The reason I decided to write this up is because initially I had solved it in a way that should have worked (to my mind), but didn’t (around 50% of the test cases failed). I couldn’t quite figure out why and had a look at the solution provided. Turned out that the magic ingredient I was missing was sorted tuples.

  Posted Jan 07, 09:25 AM · Author ribbit

• Problem of the week #6 - Misa - DMOJ - coci13c2p2

  Disclaimer: I have no idea why this problem is called “Misa” when the protagonist’s nme is “Mirko”. I can only assume that “misa” is maybe Czech for “mass”, as the problem is about shaking hands with people at church:)

  Anyway, I really enjoyed this problem, and I want to explore the approach and logic behind solving a seating arrangement problem involving handshakes. The algorithm I came up with is designed to calculate two key values:

  1. The number of existing handshakes in the seating arrangement.
  2. The maximum additional handshakes possible if Mirko takes a seat optimally.

  This solution employs a grid traversal algorithm with careful attention to boundary conditions, allowing it to work well for seating matrices of varying sizes.

  Posted Nov 20, 10:47 AM · Author ribbit

• Problem of the week #5 - ECOO '12 R1 P2 - Decoding DNA

  This one was definitely tough! By this one I mean this Decoding DNA problem from dmoj.ca. I have to admit that simply understanding the task was probably at least half the challenge, as I am not very familiar with how DNA works.

  Posted Nov 12, 11:06 AM · Author ribbit

• DMOJ - Problem of the week #4 - From 1987 to 2013 - ccc13s1

  In Python a set is considered to be an unordered collection of unique elements. I found out about this method when solving the From 1967 to 2013 Problem on DMOJ. I actually wrote a different solution initially, one that iterated through 4 digits, comparing them to each other, but then I noticed that the input can go up to the tens of thousands. Also my submission only passed half the test cases😩.

  Posted Oct 30, 09:15 AM · Author ribbit

• Action Figures -- Timus Judge Problem 2144 -- Top down approach and using functions

  Over the past month, I’ve been focusing on improving my fundamental programming skills, not by learning more Python tricks, but by strengthening my core understanding of programming concepts. A lot of this has involved working on DMOJ problems and reading Learn to Code by Solving Problems by Daniel Zingaro.

  Recently, while solving a problem from the Timus judge, the book introduced the top-down approach. This approach has been incredibly helpful for me, especially when it comes to structuring code and using functions effectively. The top-down method encourages you to start by breaking down a task into broad steps and then narrowing down what each function needs to accomplish.

  Posted Oct 21, 11:08 AM · Author ribbit

• DMOJ - Problem of the week #2 - Rue's Rings - ecoo18r1p2

  This week I finally hit 50 solved problems on DMOJ! Problem number 51 for me was Rue’s Rings

  Posted Oct 18, 08:37 AM · Author ribbit