This code appeared in the Facebook Hacker Cup 2012 – Qualification Round You have encountered a new fancy online auction that offers lots of products. You are only interested in their price and weight. We shall say that product A is strictly preferred over product B if A costs less than B and is not […]
I started studying C++ and Object Oriented Programming recently, so I decide to create a small poker game, Texas Hold’em style. It took me three days and 670 lines of code, which I don’t think is too bad given it simulates a complete poker game for one human player against 5 computer players. The fact […]
Still working on my poker game simulation, and now I got to the hand evaluation part. I had written a small C program to do it a while ago, but taking a look at it now, well, all I can say is it was pretty awful. I didn’t sort the cards on that program, so […]
I am working on a problem where I need to find the first integer which has N or more factors, where N is provided. My approach was to pre-generate a table using the number of factors as index, and the first integer that has that number of factors or more as value. I make the […]
Being able to implement your own versions of quicksort (as well as other sorts that might be suitable for the occasion) and binary search algorithms is important (you can check my own implementations here). However, when you are participating in programming contests and challenges the last thing you want to worry about is whether or […]
Suppose you have the following set: {0,1,2}. How do you generate all the possible permutations of such set? One possible approach is to use recursion. First we need to break the problem into smaller sub-problems. This could be done by splitting the set into two parts. We keep the right side fixed, and then find […]
A powerset of a given set is the combination of all subsets, including the empty subset and the set itself. Suppose we have the following set: {1,2,3}. Its powerset would be: {1,2,3} {1,2} {1,3} {2,3} {1} {2} {3} Creating an algorithm to generate a powerset is not trivial. The first idea you can use is […]