I've started to do daily programming puzzles. They have been helping me hone my programming / reasoning skills. I'm going to start using the daily puzzles to learn other languages as well since I think it will be good to learn the constructs of other languages this way (even the smallest puzzles exercise my knowledge of C++ STl...not much, but I were new to C/C++ I would have a hard time).
So the website I've been looking at is http://sixrevisions.com/resources/10-puzzle-websites-to-sharpen-your-programming-skills/ , specifically the first link has tiny little puzzles on it.
So far I've done two from this website (Sum4, Scalar Product), each of them taking a short while to think and program up. They are essentially interview questions.
The other day while reading Ken Thompson's Touring Award speech "Trusting Trust", and I encountered the Quine...a self-reproducing program. For example, in C, you would write a C program that when compiled would produce the original source, character-for-character. This sounds easy, but the naive way to go about solving this will show you that it's a little trickier than it sounds. Anyways, after a canceled flight at DFW airport and a stay in the Holiday Inn Express, I gave it a try. I figured out the solution, and I got it working the next day, It's suprisingly simple once you figure it out...but I saw some of the other results (in C) and it amazed me at just how small you can get the program. In fact, this used to be a little game with Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie when they were in College. They used to see how small of a Quine they could produce. This also led me to the discovery of "multiquines": A program written in one language produces source code for another language, which if compiled in run would reproduce the original language's source code...this is so cool!!! I might try it some day. For now, I must move on to work on Oblivion Wars...good day.
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