Project Euler
Since all my friends are on the bandwagon, I decided to register at Project Euler. Project Euler is a mathematical challenge website where the use of computer programming and high level mathematics meet to create efficient programs to solve a specific problem.
Project Euler practices the “one-minute rule”, which states that no computer program should run longer than one minute to get the answer. This encourages the programmer to do better than brute force problem and to actually go around and search for ways to better their programs. I expect to take a lot of time on some of the problems so I can learn the more complicated beautiful mathematical solutions to the problems.
I plan on using Lisp for the programming language. I figured one beautiful mathematical expression needs a beautiful programming language, one of which I’ve been dying to learn. I have friends that have chosen python, matlab, haskel and C++. Each person has decided to use a language that they haven’t had much experience in to maximize the fun and challenge of the projects.
The rating method puts you in % genius. Hopefully I will do well. 
With 175 problems, I will have plenty to work with.
I plan to run this on my G4 PowerBook, but if I need to squeeze out a little more for the one minute rule, i might thread it and run it on my quad-core 3 Ghz Intel workstation at work.
I will be posting my programs for everyone to see. If answers are posted in comments they will be deleted. No spoilers!
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January 2nd, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Welcome to the club! It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out amongst all of us. The first few were mostly brute force problems, so far I’m up to #10 - which apparently is one that normally takes longer than a minute.
The language of choice will also probably have an effect on the time consumption. My guess is that lisp will fare fairly well.
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:42 pm
I just did number 6 in mathematica, so I will wait till I get home to do it in lisp. I’m trying to minimize the brute force solutions, but looking and number 1 and 2 its hard to think outside the box on them.
As I posted elsewhere, I think we should have a competition with the amount of time it takes to solve the problems. At least just for kicks. That at least will make it so we hopefully won’t default to brute force.