Armin is playing Osmos, a physics-based puzzle game developed by Hemisphere Games. In this game, he plays a “mote”, moving around and absorbing smaller motes. A “mote” in English is a small particle. In this game, it’s a thing that absorbs (or is absorbed by) other things! The game in this problem has a similar […]
You’ve got a very busy calendar today, full of important stuff to do. You worked hard to prepare and make sure all the activities don’t overlap. Now it’s morning, and you’re worried that despite all of your enthusiasm, you won’t have the energy to do all of this with full engagement. You will have to […]
Maria has been hired by the Ghastly Chemicals Junkies (GCJ) company to help them manufacture bullseyes. A bullseye consists of a number of concentric rings (rings that are centered at the same point), and it usually represents an archery target. GCJ is interested in manufacturing black-and-white bullseyes. Maria starts with t millilitres of black paint, […]
Little John likes palindromes, and thinks them to be fair (which is a fancy word for nice). A palindrome is just an integer that reads the same backwards and forwards – so 6, 11 and 121 are all palindromes, while 10, 12, 223 and 2244 are not (even though 010=10, we don’t consider leading zeroes […]
Alice and Bob have a lawn in front of their house, shaped like an N metre by M metre rectangle. Each year, they try to cut the lawn in some interesting pattern. They used to do their cutting with shears, which was very time-consuming; but now they have a new automatic lawnmower with multiple settings, […]
Tic-Tac-Toe-Tomek is a game played on a 4 x 4 square board. The board starts empty, except that a single ‘T’ symbol may appear in one of the 16 squares. There are two players: X and O. They take turns to make moves, with X starting. In each move a player puts her symbol in […]
Here’s another problem that appeared on the 2011 Google Code Jam: You are selling beautiful geometric pictures. Each one consists of 1×1 square tiles arranged into a non-overlapping grid. For example: .##.. .#### .#### .##.. Blue tiles are represented by ‘#’ characters, and white tiles are represented by ‘.’ characters. You do not use other […]
Here’s a problem that appeared on Round 1B of Google’s Code Jam 2011 edition: Problem In the United States, 350 schools compete every year for an invitation to the NCAA College Basketball Tournament. With so many schools, how do you decide who should be invited? Most teams never play each other, and some teams have […]
In order to practice for the Round 1 of Google Code Jam 2012, which is coming in two weeks, I started solving the problems of the same round of last year’s edition. Below you’ll find the first one: The Problem I played D (D > 0) games of FreeCell today. Each game of FreeCell ends […]
This problem was worth 20 points, and you needed to think about it a bit, but finding the answer wasn’t that difficult. The Problem You’re watching a show where Googlers (employees of Google) dance, and then each dancer is given a triplet of scores by three judges. Each triplet of scores consists of three integer […]