Community puzzle challenge #2 - Flood the World

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

No, I’m not.

2 Likes

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

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

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

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

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

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