Concept Storm 3: September - A programming competition

[DimensionWarped]

Rules: Contestants will form teams of 1 or 2 programmers

Problem Set 1-5 will be posted September 1, 2010

Solution Set 1-5 will be due September 15, 2010

Problem Set 6-10 will be posted September 15, 2010

Solution Set 6-10 will be due September 30, 2010

The format will be typical for a programming competition. The problems can be done in any language on any platform. All that is important is that the result matches with the expectation.

Depending on how possible it is, all participants will get some kind of badge type thingy for participation. Also, people who complete 8+ problems will have some kind of silver accolade while a perfect score nets a gold accolade.

Problems vary in difficulty. A typical problem could be something like:

A forest is an nxn matrix of size 1, 2, and 3 trees.

a size 1 tree occupies only a single spot on the matrix.

a size 2 tree occupies a this following shape:

_X

XXX

_X

a size 3 tree occupies a larger shape:

__X

_XXX_

XXXXX

_XXX

__X

Populate a forest of any given size with n trees such that no two trees are ever adjacent (X 1 space to the left/right or above/down of another tree's space. Diagonals are allowed though) to one another.

[LarkSS]

Maybe if college hadn't started already I wouldn't have minded trying this out.

[luksamuk]

It sounded to me more like a Maths test, but oh, it's only an example. Let's see if I get something here.

[DimensionWarped]

Programming and Math are synonymous. There isn't a programming problem in the world that doesn't involve at least a little math, even if you can't see it.

[luksamuk]

Programming and Math are synonymous. There isn't a programming problem in the world that doesn't involve at least a little math, even if you can't see it.

I know, but I meant that Maths are, in fact, implicit on it.

[Steven M]

Populate a forest of any given size with n trees such that no two trees are ever adjacent (X 1 space to the left/right or above/down of another tree's space. Diagonals are allowed though) to one another.

As a rank amateur in C/C++ programming (complete with obligatory "Hello World" build) I'm going to attempt this problem first, if that's alright.

EDIT: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?guw6ojhdcv7646j - it doesn't seem to play nice with larger numbers, since I can't seem to fix the size of the console window yet, but it works!