[Haxalot]

The Hack Forums Coding Contest:
Week 13

About

• The HFCC is a weekly coding contest hosted by myself for the Hack Forums community. You will have 3 days to solve 4 programming challenges I have randomly selected from Hackerrank. The contest will start at 4pm (GMT) every Friday, and end at 4pm (GMT) every Monday.
  
  The next thread detailing the next contest will be created every Monday, after the previous week's contest has finished.
  
  You should not use this thread to post solutions or provide hints until the contest is over. Anyone violating this rule will be barred from the current and all future contests I host.
  
  
  Previous weeks: (Click to View)
  • The Hack Forums Coding Contest - Week 1
    
  
  
  • The Hack Forums Coding Contest - Week 2
    
  
  
  • The Hack Forums Coding Contest - Week 3
    
  
  
  • The Hack Forums Coding Contest - Week 4
    
  
  
  • The Hack Forums Coding Contest - Week 5
    
  
  
  • The Hack Forums Coding Contest - Week 6
    
  
  
  • The Hack Forums Coding Contest - Week 7
    
  
  
  • The Hack Forums Coding Contest - Week 8
    
  
  
  • The Hack Forums Coding Contest - Week 9
    
  
  
  • The Hack Forums Coding Contest - Week 10
    
  
  
  • The Hack Forums Coding Contest - Week 11
    
  
  
  • The Hack Forums Coding Contest - Week 12
    
  
  
  
  

What's the Point?

• Coding challenges are a great way to improve upon your programming abilities. They encourage you to:
  • learn new data structures and algorithms
    
  
  
  • think critically and analytically about problems by breaking them down into smaller and simpler sub problems
    
  
  
  • be performance-conscious of the code you write
    
  
  
  
  
  This will help you to:
  • be able to aptly apply a variety of data structures and algorithms to any problems you encounter when programming
    
  
  
  • improve your problem solving abilities, enabling you to tackle increasingly complex problems
    
  
  
  • learn new programming techniques (such as bit manipulation, memoisation, etc)
    
  
  
  
  
  Another great advantage is that companies frequently test their candidates in interviews with similar challenges to what you will be solving in these contests. By practicing these problems, you are effectively preparing yourself for future interviews, giving you the best chance possible to secure a great job at a top company. All of the largest companies in the software industry (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc) will be looking for candidates who are great problem solvers, and the only way they can see if you're a great problem solver is by giving you programming challenges.
  
  So by entering these contests, you will ultimately become a better programmer and improve your employability prospects, all whilst having fun solving problems with other members here.
  

Leaderboard

1. thesecretjew99 (30)
   

I'm always open to hearing feedback if members here have any thoughts on the difficulty or number of the challenges presented, the length of the contest, or the starting times.

I've lowered the challenge count to 4 from now on, given that participants have never managed to actually solve all 5 challenges yet.

Sign Up and Get Involved!

[Haxalot]

This week's contest has now started, for the interested.

[randomized patterns]

I would be way more interested if this is like the dailyprogrammer and we each shared our implementation while helping eachother.

[Haxalot]

I would be way more interested if this is like the dailyprogrammer and we each shared our implementation while helping eachother.

If members are allowed to discuss and share their implementations here, then others will simply copy and use those answers, making the contest pretty pointless. Not to mention the problems presented here are generally too easy to require collaboration.

Perhaps a daily (or weekly) thread could be created for one specific hard problem, and community members could come together to solve this problem? I'm not sure whether this will work particularly well, though. Most problems have their solutions easily accessible online, so instead of getting members here to brainstorm solutions and work together, we'll most likely just end up with copied solutions being presented here from elsewhere...

[ᏙictorҮ]

Great idea to be honest I suck ar programming so I don't think I'll be able to even do anything

[randomized patterns]

If members are allowed to discuss and share their implementations here, then others will simply copy and use those answers, making the contest pretty pointless. Not to mention the problems presented here are generally too easy to require collaboration.

Perhaps a daily (or weekly) thread could be created for one specific hard problem, and community members could come together to solve this problem? I'm not sure whether this will work particularly well, though. Most problems have their solutions easily accessible online, so instead of getting members here to brainstorm solutions and work together, we'll most likely just end up with copied solutions being presented here from elsewhere...

I wouldn't necessarily call it a contest if it was in a dailyprogrammer format. More so, for fun I could say. People copying other people's work would not really mean much. The person copying would essentially not learn anything - therefore it would be pointless... It would be pretty easy to spot when people copy other people's work.

Also, if it was in a dailyprogrammer style format people could provide implementations in any language. I'm not trying to put down your current contest, I am just recommending something that can be more enjoyable.