Comments on: Google Treasure Hunt - No solutions here, only hints

By: Vaibhav

Vaibhav — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:02:37 +0000

I too am on the primes problem. I am still to start on it (no free time) and yes, I am also looking at brute force…

By: Geoff

Geoff — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:10:56 +0000

man bc for the robot question (unless you’re not fortunate enough to have unix/linux box handy).

“bc(1)

NAME
bc - An arbitrary precision calculator language
…”

Think factorial. Beware the fencepost.

I’ve got three confirmed and I’m cranking on the primes (last?) one in my free time. Maybe I’m missing something, but my first attack is a bit brute force. I did catch that it could be a (sort of) m+n prob instead of m*n.

Somehow my solution (if I can call it that, I don’t yet have an answer) doesn’t feel elegant yet.

By: Soloman

Soloman — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:43:45 +0000

private static BigInteger linearRobot(int w, int h){
BigDecimal num= BigDecimal.ONE;
for(int i=1;i num=num.divide(BigDecimal.valueOf(i), 10, BigDecimal.ROUND_HALF_UP).multiply(BigDecimal.valueOf(i+w-1));
}
return num.toBigInteger();
}

By: Habitually Good » Blog Archive » Google Treasure Hunt - use logic to solve 3rd question

Tue, 27 May 2008 17:27:16 +0000

[...] third installment of the Google Treasure Hunt is live. I have been through the first two challenges and been successful at solving them [...]

By: Prashant

Prashant — Tue, 20 May 2008 23:18:43 +0000

The first one can be solved in one line of copious Haskell

By: Vaibhav

Vaibhav — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:55:51 +0000

@Ryan, yup… I wrote a program finally…

By: Habitually Good » Blog Archive » Handling very large numbers in .Net

Habitually Good » Blog Archive » Handling very large numbers in .Net — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:54:02 +0000

[...] recent attempts at playing the Google Treasure Hunt found me looking for ways to work with very large numbers. My solution to the first puzzle was [...]

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:30:23 +0000

i also started with excel but found out it only handles 15 digits of precision. There is a piece of software called xlprecision that is a excel plugin that is supposed to give you many more digits but it is not available for mac.

I opted to write a ruby program. Very straight forward, memory was no problem.

By: Vaibhav

Vaibhav — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:29:36 +0000

Well, got both of them correct… 2 of 2… yeah

By: Vaibhav

Vaibhav — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:21:16 +0000

@C, yup… working on it…

By: C

Tue, 20 May 2008 14:21:54 +0000

Rethink your programmatic solution. This problem can be solved without destroying your computer & memory.

By: Vaibhav

Vaibhav — Tue, 20 May 2008 13:48:41 +0000

Okay, got it. The reason for why I was getting an incorrect answer for Number 1 is because Excel can’t handle precision to that extent.

Back to the programming board…