Lloyd Cole overdose

The reason it's a cliche is because it's true.

November 3, 2011 at 4:29pm

Problem 193

Squarefree numbers.

Found searching for “project euler” in OEIS.

October 29, 2011 at 2:34pm

Problems 114 to 117

These all flow from 114, and the secret there is to use recursion to try to fill the space to the right. Don’t forget to memoize the recursion function.

October 28, 2011 at 2:30pm

Problem 187

Semiprimes.

Easily done if you have a few million primes on hand.

There’s a sequence in Sloane that gives the answer directly, too!

October 27, 2011 at 2:30pm

Problem 100

Finding the number of blue discs for which there is 50% chance of taking two blue.

I started researching the hypergeometric distribution and thought about comparing it to a binomial distribution at large numbers before twigging that if you expand the problem it’s a quadratic Diophantine equation. There’s an online solver that provides factors for these equations and after that it was simply a matter of plugging them in.

October 26, 2011 at 2:30pm

Problem 203

Squarefree binomial coefficients.

I had in mind optimisations in only calculating half the triangle, but in the end it didn’t signify. I used the Pari issquarefree() function. Biggest issue was forgetting telling Perl to use arbitrary precision integers.

6:06am

Problem 119

Investigating the numbers which are equal to sum of their digits raised to some power.

I turned this over in my mind trying to find some limit so I didn’t have such an enormous search space. Then I found A023106 in Sloane which gives all but the last few terms, and then it was really fast to brute force.

To be quite honest this was a bit easy for this level.

November 18, 2008 at 8:38am

Yes, you should think about what you’re doing, obviously. Don’t just type random gibberish as fast as you can on the screen, unless you’re a Perl programmer.

— Coding Horror: We Are Typists First, Programmers Second

November 15, 2008 at 3:31pm

Give Up and Use Tables →

you know you want to

November 14, 2008 at 5:42am

This base time of Nov. 17, 1858 has since been used by TOPS-10, TOPS-20, and VAX VMS and OpenVMS. Given this base date, the 100 nanosecond granularity implemented within OpenVMS and the 63-bit absolute time representation […], OpenVMS should have no trouble with time until:

31-JUL-31086 02:48:05.47

At this time, all clocks and time-keeping operations in OpenVMS will suddenly stop, as system time values go negative.

— Computer Problems With Calendars & Time Including Y2K