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by Barrin92
907 days ago
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I like them a lot because they inject a little bit of empirical or heuristic thinking into problems. For this particular problem I immediately reached for graphviz to get an idea of what the circuit looks like and it made it obvious what the solution was. It's much closer to how real world engineering problems work where you have to do a little bit of investigation and maybe find some creative way to constrain your problem that nobody explicitly tells you about. Much prefer it to the 'here are the exact five keywords so you know what CS class algorithm you need to use' kind of thing. |
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I _love_ when one of these problems encourages me to reach for a tool like that. (At least, when it's one I'm already aware of and I have time to dedicate to grokking and solving the puzzle).
I used graphviz on one of last years problems and found it pretty helpful. It just feels so cool when you learn a new "spell" to help you feel out the problem.
Another example was from 2020, where I used lexx/yacc to generate a parser for the expressions in the input. This was honestly probably slower than just doing it myself but it felt so cool to solve it with a tool - and it's neat to plant little signposts in your brain that will light up when you run across a similar class of problem in your real work.
Another thing I often do is use vim to munge the input and save myself some parsing code, which is a very generically useful branch of "magic" to have under your fingers.