Ryan J Thompson

This post is part of a series on Mohammad Anwar’s excellent Weekly Challenge, where hackers submit solutions in Perl, Raku, or any other language, to two different challenges every week. (It’s a lot of fun, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

Task #1 this week is a simple cipher, described as follows:

The square secret code mechanism first removes any space from the original message. Then it lays down the message in a row of 8 columns. The coded message is then obtained by reading down the columns going left to right.

Given “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, the expected result is “tbjrd hruto eomhg qwpe unsl ifoa covz kxey”.

This post is part of a series on Mohammad Anwar’s excellent Weekly Challenge, where hackers submit solutions in Perl, Raku, or any other language, to two different challenges every week. (It’s a lot of fun, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

For challenge #2 this week, the task is to start with $1, and by either adding $1 or doubling the amount, reach $200 in the smallest possible number of steps.

“Greedy never works”

In a 75-minute lecture some decades ago, my Advanced Algorithms professor said, over and over, “greedy never works,” while all the while showing us exceptions to that mantra. Greedy algorithms operate by always making the locally optimal choice, which might be the biggest/smallest, closest to the goal, etc., depending on the problem. However, for a great many problems, the locally optimal choice is not always the best. For example, suppose you’re trying to climb the following mountain range (The ASCIIHorn):

        B  
       /\
  /\A /  \
 /  \/    \
/    C     \

Let’s say you’re at position (A), and your goal is to find the highest point. A greedy algorithm would always choose to go higher, never lower (even temporarily), so you’d reach the smaller left peak, and be stuck there. This is known as a hill climbing problem, for which greedy doesn’t work, because you have to go down through the valley (C) before you go up to the goal (B).

This post is part of a series on Mohammad Anwar’s excellent Weekly Challenge, where hackers submit solutions in Perl, Raku, or any other language, to two different challenges every week. (It’s a lot of fun, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

Challenge #1 this week is as follows:

You are given a string “123456789”. Write a script that would insert ”+” or ”-” in between digits so that when you evaluate, the result should be 100.

I am going to add the additional constraint that we want all possible solutions, because that is a much stronger statement, and not that difficult to do. There are a few ways we could go about it, but one way that will ensure we traverse the entire search tree is to try every permutation of +, -, and ” (i.e., nothing) in between each decimal digit. As a minimal example, given the string 12, we would have the following expressions:

+1      +1-2    -1+2    +12
+1+2    -1      -1-2    -12

Recursion gives us a search tree for free, so we’ll use that.

This post is part of a series on Mohammad Anwar’s excellent Weekly Challenge, where hackers submit solutions in Perl, Raku, or any other language, to two different challenges every week. (It’s a lot of fun, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

Challenge #2 this week (43) is to generate Self-descriptive Numbers in arbitrary bases. A self-descriptive number, as described by Wikipedia, is an integer m that in a given base b is b digits long in which each digit d at position n (the most significant digit being at position 0 and the least significant at position b – 1) counts how many instances of digit n are in m.

This post is part of a series on Mohammad Anwar’s excellent Weekly Challenge, where hackers submit solutions in Perl, Raku, or any other language, to two different challenges every week. (It’s a lot of fun, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

Challenge #1 this week (43) is a number puzzle. In short, the task is to fill in the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 into the spaces within the intersecting Olympic rings, so that the numbers in each ring sum to 11. Some of the spaces are already filled in (given). Here is the starting point:

I was able to solve this just by staring at it for a few seconds, so I knew this wasn’t going to be a computationally intensive task. And so instead I wrote a console program that draws the rings and animates every step of the recursive backtracking algorithm I used, because why not.

This post is part of a series on Mohammad Anwar’s excellent Weekly Challenge, where hackers submit solutions in Perl, Raku, or any other language, to two different challenges every week. (It’s a lot of fun, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

The second challenge this week is another old chestnut:

Write a script to generate a string with random number of ( and ) brackets. Then make the script validate the string if it has balanced brackets.

The question has two parts:

This post is part of a series on Mohammad Anwar’s excellent Weekly Challenge, where hackers submit solutions in Perl, Raku, or any other language, to two different challenges every week. (It’s a lot of fun, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

Challenge 1 this week is an easy one:

Write a script to print decimal number 0 to 50 in [the] Octal Number System.

Perl and Raku

We can solve this with the following polyglot (runs in both languages at once):

printf "Decimal %2d = Octal %2o\n", $_, $_ for 0..50;

Still, in Raku, we can do the following: