Thread: Codechef

Issues:

On the work PC I use Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. It's not listed as acceptable. At home I use Mac iBook G5 & MacBook laptops loaded with Apple's XCode. I don't think I'm out of line expecting contests to use such common tools.

If the contest is about algorithms it should just accept source code of the relevant function. If it want's you to play Russian roulette with particular compilers, operating system (e.g. Gentoo Linux), library calls standard input/output and thus compiler & environment particularities - that's what I call irrelevant requirements.

There are also specific irrelevancies built into the problem requirement: that of wanting the next palindrome in all cases rather than accepting the result as being equal to the input if it's already a palindrome. That necessitates the useless step of incrementing the input string/number by 1 and propagating carries from right-to-left for all '9's. Also, one must check whether the input is all '9's to begin with in which case allocate a separate buffer that's 1 byte longer than the input string, and returning a 10000....1 for that case. Rather than be able to use the passed buffer in-place as result holder. These are annoying and off-topic distractions to the next-palindrome algorithm.

In the table "Successful Submissions for this Problem", rows are for example:

User Mem Time Lang
PS 2.4M 0.13 C

No explanation of what 2.4M means. Memory footprint of the executable? No explanation of what 0.13 means. Time includes load and I/O ? It's not in the FAQ. If you saw it in the FAQ you've got better eyes than me.

Originally Posted by nonoob

Issues:

On the work PC I use Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. It's not listed as acceptable. At home I use Mac iBook G5 & MacBook laptops loaded with Apple's XCode. I don't think I'm out of line expecting contests to use such common tools.

If you don't know that XCode uses gcc under the hood .... And as stated in the FAQ (that you apparently also missed), they don't care what compiler you use, as long as you write standard code (no conio.h, no windows.h). The number of people there who claim to use Turbo C....

Originally Posted by nonoob

If the contest is about algorithms it should just accept source code of the relevant function.

It does. You submit source code, they compile it and run it.

Originally Posted by nonoob

There are also specific irrelevancies built into the problem requirement: that of wanting the next palindrome in all cases rather than accepting the result as being equal to the input if it's already a palindrome. That necessitates the useless step of incrementing the input string/number by 1 and propagating carries from right-to-left for all '9's. Also, one must check whether the input is all '9's to begin with in which case allocate a separate buffer that's 1 byte longer than the input string, and returning a 10000....1 for that case. Rather than be able to use the passed buffer in-place as result holder. These are annoying and off-topic distractions to the next-palindrome algorithm.

You're joking, right? I mean ... you're joking, right? You're complaining that the problem they wrote doesn't match the one you want to solve?


In the table "Successful Submissions for this Problem", rows are for example:

User Mem Time Lang
PS 2.4M 0.13 C

No explanation of what 2.4M means. Memory footprint of the executable? No explanation of what 0.13 means. Time includes load and I/O ? It's not in the FAQ. If you saw it in the FAQ you've got better eyes than me.[/QUOTE]
I'm pretty sure I read in the FAQ that the line under "Time" comes from "time ./whatever", or the sum of those if the test uses multiple inputs. I don't remember where Mem comes from.