These problems. Do most of you have a strong background in math? For instance do most of you have a lot of math courses? So far I have Calculus 1 and 2 under my belt, and have not yet taken Discrete Math(will be taking it in the summer). Or is most of this common sense stuff?
I just want to know where I stand in most of this. I look at these problems and want to write for loops for most of them, but I know that is probably really inefficient.
Thanks.
How do you guys do it?
-
Kiith_Nabaal
- Posts: 2
- Joined: Sun Feb 28, 2010 2:18 am
-
quilan
- Posts: 182
- Joined: Fri Aug 03, 2007 11:08 pm
Re: How do you guys do it?
Well, VERY few of the later problems (maybe >100-150) are 'common sense'. That being said, while there are a few of them that required knowledge of some math theorems, etc... many of those can be found by googling, going to wolfram, wikipedia, etc. The good majority of the recent problems that have been posted are solvable with nothing more than a metric ton of ingenuity, foresight & usually some hardcore notepad / excel action to detect patterns. In fact, my typical scenario for going over a problem is to write up a brute force program to generate some basic results, then play around with the numbers in notepad / excel to see what correlations I can figure out. Given enough time each problem will go down.Kiith_Nabaal wrote:These problems. Do most of you have a strong background in math? For instance do most of you have a lot of math courses? So far I have Calculus 1 and 2 under my belt, and have not yet taken Discrete Math(will be taking it in the summer). Or is most of this common sense stuff?
I just want to know where I stand in most of this. I look at these problems and want to write for loops for most of them, but I know that is probably really inefficient.
Thanks.
ex ~100%'er... until the gf came along.
-
harryh
- Posts: 2091
- Joined: Tue Aug 22, 2006 9:33 pm
- Location: Thessaloniki, Greece
Re: How do you guys do it?
Another often quoted bit of advice is this:
Take the problems in order. For each problem you solve, go through the forum that opens when you submit the correct answer. Concentrate on those methods, algorithms and approaches that seem to be much more efficient than the one you've used. Implement whatever strikes you as particularly clever / more generally applicable / most efficient. You will thus build up A LOT of insight and accumulated knowledge, as well as useful code snippets.
Good luck in your endeavour
Take the problems in order. For each problem you solve, go through the forum that opens when you submit the correct answer. Concentrate on those methods, algorithms and approaches that seem to be much more efficient than the one you've used. Implement whatever strikes you as particularly clever / more generally applicable / most efficient. You will thus build up A LOT of insight and accumulated knowledge, as well as useful code snippets.
Good luck in your endeavour