My day job involves plenty of design decisions, but not much in the way of real algorithmic exercises, and there's always the fear of going rusty. So, I thought I'd have a go at some Google Code Jam questions. I missed this year's Jam, just starting out on my practice as the competition's final round was happening. So, I wasn't doing any of this in competition setting, but I did try to time myself where possible.
I'd never really looked into the Code Jam before. An ex-colleague of mine, Luke Pebody, made it to the world finals, so it did seem interesting. I mean, yes, the guy's really quite bright, but how hard could it be? Presumably, it's just writing bug-free code nice and quickly, and even if I'm not super fast I should be able to get it right.
Oh no, this is hard stuff. Finding the right algorithmic approach, let alone coding it bug-free in any reasonable time, is difficult. I did the example questions, and then ploughed on in to the 2014 questions. Even in the early rounds I'm running an integer multiple times slower than the best must have been working. Occasional individual questions took me more time than the whole of that round. I thought I was good at algorithmic stuff. This whole thing has been exceptionally humbling.
The final straw was 2014 Round 3, Question C: Crime House. This question was correctly answered in time by 16 of the very best coders in the world (from a round of several hundred entrants). It's hard. The small case is doable. The hard case required me to try approach after approach as I tried to wrap my head around the optimal solution. It's taken me an embarassingly long time, and it's been seriously painful. I've finally completed it. It is utterly depressing to me that I'm still not entirely sure why my solution works.
At the end of that, I realise that there are 16 people who managed to do this in the 2.5 hour timeframe, with other questions. Astonishing.
Anyway, if I daren't spend this kind of time on any more questions, so for the moment I'm putting this on hold (the very next question was answered correctly by precisely zero of the world's top coders. I don't fancy my chances). I'll come back to it when I'm ready. In the meantime, my horribly hacky code is up on github.
Posted 2014-10-01.