[Community Puzzle] Mitosis Mayhem

Puzzles
#1

Coding Games and Programming Challenges to Code Better

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Created by @CoolandonRS,validated by @FlorianD33,@chris.steele and @Edjy.
If you have any issues, feel free to ping them.

#2

I think that there are a bit too few concepts that are not completely developed here.

  1. You say “add a cell”, this should maybe be changed to “add a new type of cell”, because you use the term “cell” as both a type of cell and as the count of total cells.

  2. You say the “power” is the strength of the cell, it doesn’t tell the player anything new, this can be misleading in my opinion, as it is a lot of information but there isn’t anything that is possible to extract from that part of the statement.

  3. You say “[d]uring a cycle, all cells are doubled, after which you follow the scientists instructions”, but this isn’t true. You just say that first, all of the cells already in the vat try to grow and then later on you can describe the procedure by which cells grow. i.e. If there is room, cells will grow by doubling.

  4. This is similar to 3., but the competition between different named cells is very hard to understand. For example, what happens if there are less than enough empty cells for the desired growth? OR, what if you have lets say 5 different cells each with power = 1 and n=5 cells (so thats 25 count, the confusion of the language used in the description is in full display here I’d say) and you have another cell with power = 1 and n = 225 cells (assuming max = 250), then how would that work?? Can a higher power cell take count from cells without enough count to fulfill those growth desires? There’s just so much underdeveloped logic… :frowning:

  5. Your output says that you may have next “cycles” lines, but this is not always the case. You should instead have “however many lines” or something like that as it is not accurate as it is written currently.

  6. You say that the “conflict” space gets divided evenly with floor division, what if there is an odd number of empty spaces in conflict between two equal power cells? What if there is 1 empty space and two highest power cells?? The vat won’t be exactly full, so they won’t take from lower cells, so how does it get resolved??? Also, why did you only specify that conflict space is divided by floor division but didn’t mention that 1/10th of the desired growth is done by floor division?

  7. You used the term “type” at the end of the problem statement :expressionless: sorry I didn’t get a chance to review these things before this was approved but this has so many issues as it is right now :confused:

3 Likes
#3

I don’t think it is worth fixing, just downvote.

1 Like
#4

Looking through at the original contribution and feedback, I’m confused how so many people were on board with this. There is so many possibilities that aren’t addressed in the problem statement. There should either be “here are the possible configurations” to make it clear what scenarios will not occur, state that they won’t occur, or describe how they will be addressed. You’re probably right unfortunately. I did a fungus competition model for a paper I worked on a couple of years ago, so a puzzle like this seemed interesting, but its just so lacking.

#5
  1. Two cells, max = 50, cell 1 has 20, cell 2 has 5, then it goes to 40/10 but if cell 1 has 20 and cell 2 has 6, it goes to 32/13??? cell 2 MORE than doubles because they wanted to grow into the same space (assuming cell1/2 have the same power). Come on.