[Community Puzzle] Christmas Tree

Puzzles
#1

https://www.codingame.com/training/medium/christmas-tree

Send your feedback or ask for help here!

Created by @igreactive,validated by @AgathokakologicalBit,@kugan49 and @tutubalin.
If you have any issues, feel free to ping them.

#2

The problem says:

At the moment of writing it I know it’s possible to solve it in JVM languages and Python.

What an advice!

Why not directly tell us in what languages it is “impossible” (or very difficult) to have it solved (because these “poor” languages do not have BigInt support).

#3

Having to deal with bigints adds nothing to the quality of the puzzle. Without the big test cases, this would have been an ok-ish easy elementary school math puzzle (not much to do with coding though). With bigints, there is an additional ‘practice using a library’ aspect, not particularly interesting.
What might be slightly more interesting: is it solvable with int64 only?

#4

I solved it using gmp in c++, which is always fun since you have to be sneaky about it.

#5

Solved it with BigInt in JS and BigInteger in C#.
Imo the math part of the puzzle is ok, fairly easy but still requires some thought.
Fighting the numerical limits oth is just a chore :expressionless:

1 Like
#6

Thought a puzzle with ‘just few lines of calculations’ in Python would be easy to translate in other languages to increase my count.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Even inside the JVM family there are differences, the exact same formulas/types work in Kotlin and Groovy but not Scala for example :upside_down_face:

The main problem is not the big integers but the float errors, even when casting BigDecimal everywhere it’s a pain to make it work.

1 Like
#7

Solve it in lua using long int (signed int64). Not very clean (you must manage overflow , checking if the value becomes negative), but it can be done.

In another hand, I don’t understand why using so large number but to create artificial difficulty.

3 Likes
#8

Work in java too. (use long but to compute the square root)

In fact one validator is more difficult to pass.
For passing it, I must not do the computation with u*(u-1)/2, I must do the division by 2 on the even number and then multiply the two numbers … :rofl:

4 Likes
#9

My solution in Pacal with UInt64 works fine with all samples but fails in “Tricky tree validator” :frowning:
Any idea to help me understand my mistake ?

#10

Both input numbers in that validator are smaller than 10. You may create some custom cases to test your code.

#11

Hello everyone, I am currently trying to solve this with JavaScript,
I used BigInt type and the formula of Arithmetic Progressions but the result of my code and result of Extreme Tree (all of them) are kinda different. For more specific, the larger input, the larger distance between result of my code and result of validators/tests. So anyone have solved this puzzle with JavaScript? Can you give me some hint for this?
.
Extreme Tree 1

Failure
Found: 79622251179821
Expected: 79622251179820

.
Extreme Tree 2

Failure
Found: 8965527306
Expected: 8965527305

.
Extreme Tree 3

Failure
Found: 4791279503
Expected: 4791279374

.
Extreme Tree 4

Failure
Found: 11205065516
Expected: 11205065451

.
Extreme Tree 5

Failure
Found: 7485514730
Expected: 7485514696

.
Thanks in advance