Community puzzle challenge #2 - Flood the World

Puzzles
#1

The first community puzzle challenge was a moderate success. I will be posting a recap in that thread shortly. Now on to the next challenge!

I have developed a script that will sort the community puzzles based on the formula timesSolved / daysAvailable. Applying this script, I get the following at the top:

Haunted Manor - 239 days, 20 solved - 0.08
Flood the World - 156 days, 18 solved - 0.12

Even after the challenge, Haunted Manor is still at the top of this difficulty calculation. That’s one hard puzzle.

The next in line is Flood the World. This is a very worthy challenge as well. It is unique from pretty much all other community puzzles available. It’s not a mathematical riddle. It’s not an exercise in ASCII art. It’s not another application of BFS or DFS. There’s no brute-forcing this one. You need to think hard about what’s happening in the problem statement.

And of course, it requires some serious coding skills. Are you up to the task?

  • danBhentschel
Community puzzle challenge #1 - Haunted Manor
Community puzzle challenge #3 - Squares order
#2

No, I’m not.

2 Likes
#3

Thanks for those stats… was a bit bummed that Flood the World was kicking my butt when it didn’t seem too hard at first glance. Glad to know I’m not alone.

Edit: Finally got it right after reexamining a rather stupid assumption I made in the early going. Changed about 5 keystrokes from my initial solution :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#4

About 2 weeks into the challenge, and another 11 people have solved this one! It doesn’t hurt that it was Puzzle of the Week last week. :slight_smile:

Here are the solutions published since the challenge began:

@aries (Haskell)
@RoboStac (Go)
@Luun (Perl)
@manuemar_nokia (Python)
@MrAnderson (C#)
@sedcore ©
@ree (C#)

Congratulations to all who have tried and succeeded! It is certainly an accomplishment!

For those who haven’t finished it, the challenge isn’t over yet! Keep trying!

  • danBhentschel
#5

Quite an interesting solution you came up with, too. I’m tempted to add a test case that doesn’t work for your code. :wink:

Well done. I applaud your ingenuity.

  • danBhentschel
#6

Okay! It’s been a bit over a month since I posted this challenge, and 14 of you have been victorious! Congratulations to all 32 coding wizards who have solved this excellent puzzle. Here is a list of all 18 published solutions:

Plopx ©
player_one (C#)
magaiti (C++)
Kyran (PHP)
Ni (Swift)
Visual (Javascript)
dwarfie (PHP)
MathJason (Python3)
ValNykol (Ruby)
DewJunkie (C#)
Aries (Haskell)
RoboStac (Go)
Luun (Perl)
manuemar_nokia (Python)
sedcore ©
MrAnderson (C#)
Ree (C#)
Chipmunk_meg (Java)

After this month’s push, Flood the World has moved from 2nd lowest solve rate (0.12 solutions / day) to 8th lowest (0.17 solutions / day) making way for a new community puzzle challenge. Stay tuned!

  • danBhentschel
#7

You can’t leave it at that. What is the current lowest solve rate ranking?!?!?!

#8

Ooops… Sorry. Haunted Manor is very definitely still the lowest solve rate… 0.08 solutions per day. No other puzzle is even close to that at this time.

  • danBhentschel