Project Euler Forum

@SoboLAN Thanks for responding. Just regarding your point about needing to wait 15-18 months to generate this kind of statistic - I wonder why that would be the case. Surely you only need to accumulate one month's worth of data to generate a ranking chart of PE score accumulated in the past month. You may of course have been talking more about practical/logistical rather than theoretical considerations, or perhaps you're just saying that this is unlikely to be implemented as a standalone addition, but could possibly be included as part of a larger set of statistics based on the new timestamp field (in which case - fair enough).

Just like to say, the lucky luke award mentions "lucky numbers", and I only found out what those were by searching in these forums. I think they are definitely not as well known as, say, the primes or the triangle numbers, and there is of course the usual connotation which made me assume that they were "hidden numbers pulled out of a hat" (so I thought I'd just have to keep doing problems until I stumbled across 50 of them).

So perhaps it'd be nice (unless the intention was to benefit those who knew this particular bit of mathematical trivia) to link to the wikipedia page or something in the award description. Hopefully something like "Solve fifty [blue hyperlink]lucky number[/blue hyperlink]ed problems" or similar.

Many thanks! I'm completely addicted to this website!

I would love it if the minimal pages could be viewed without having to log in.

I see that you are not considering major changes to the way the site works, but I'm just going to suggest this, and if not for this site at some point in the future, it would be cool if it was implemented on another site. (it has probably been suggested before in some form or another):

Add a facility to upload (source code or) compiled code that could be (compiled and) run on the site's servers under standard conditions, so that the time that the program runs can be recorded and compared to other users. That way, for each problem there can be a competition of who can make the most efficient code. Obviously this has various problems, one of which may be a security concerns but it would add an extra dimension to the site, allowing people to actively try to optimise their solutions, rather than quitting when they've completed the problem. To save processing power the server can, for example, cut off running submissions after 1-2 minutes, immediately disqualifying inefficient processor-hogging algorithms that can't compete against the faster ones anyway.

I think this could renew interest among seasoned users in problems that they have already completed, but sub-optimally. What does everyone think?

Hi!

Is there any way to make my progress page public? I'm a newcomer, I did not solve many problems, but later my progress page could be a good boost to my cv if I could make a hyperlink to it.

No, the Progress page is not public, it's just for you. However, there is something public that you could use:


As for the CV thing: it rarely counts (a.k.a. almost never). My advice to you is to avoid adding the number of solved Project Euler problems to your CV UNLESS you can prove how you solved every single problem. In my experience, most employers never heard of Project Euler and, if you're lucky enough to stumble upon one who did, he knows how easy it is to search for algorithms and solutions for these problems.

If, for example, you would have a blog where you post your thought process for solving every problem, then maybe it could count... maybe.

Let's say he sees that you solved 350 problems. That's pretty impressive. The problem with this is that it's irrelevant unless there's some way for your potential employer to check whether you solved them on your own. Yes, he could ask you to solve them again on the spot and see your thought process. But honestly, if the potential employer would want to know if you have an analytical mind and if you're good with algorithms, there are more reliable ways to do it.

Bottom line: Don't think of solving Project Euler problems as the objective, think of it as a way to improve your problem solving skills AND NOTHING MORE. Once you get better at it, you might be able to design programs and integrate fancy algorithms in your projects. Those projects are the ones you should mention on your CV, not Project Euler. They're more relevant because there's a much higher chance that YOU are the one who actually designed them...

PS: Personally, I have about 99 % of the solutions stored somewhere. If I wanted, I could just provide them to the solution checking mechanism and reach the maximum level with no significant effort (though it would take a while...). I choose not to because I'm not a cheater and there really is no point... I would gain nothing (maybe a banned account ).

Thank You for the answer!

I agree with some things You wrote, but I still think that public progress pages would be great.

Some employers can not call everybody to a job interview. I would prove my skills if they would call, but perhaps I won't even have a chance.
If an employer or a HR-guy takes a look at a progress page, they probably will look around on the site and that can not be a negative thing for me. I believe You that most of the solutions can be downloaded, but there are some awards that people can not recieve without programming skills (fastest solvers, kudo related ones, ...).

On the http://projecteuler.net/eulerians page it would be nice to have a wider grey text box for when you hover over a user's notefield. Myself (and a few others) list friend keys in this field, but they hang over the right edge of the box.

I know that in the last 50 or so years this terminology detail has been discussed over and over but isn't now a standard to refer to the language as "assembly" and to the program that translates an assembly source file into machine code as "assembler"?
In statistic/languages i see assembler used as name of the language, it feels wrong, althought it maybe isn't due to the confusion arosen after decades when the 2 terms have been used in stead of each other!

"Assembler" has been changed to "Assembly".

Marcus Stuhr wrote:On the http://projecteuler.net/eulerians page it would be nice to have a wider grey text box for when you hover over a user's notefield. Myself (and a few others) list friend keys in this field, but they hang over the right edge of the box.

Done.

Speaking of that, is there a way to somehow make the box wrap around the whole text ?

Example of how it looks now:
I'm using Firefox 18 on Windows 7, so it's probably not because of the browser's age. And yes: I did clear my cache.

Done.

Hi,

Would it be possible to have a list of problems recently solved by friends ?
Something easily parsable, like Atom, would be especially nice.

I see two reasons for this :

• I often look at problems solved by friends, since they often are interesting ones;
• The computer-friendliness allows for applications like IRC robots notifying groups of friends when one of them solves a new problem.

Regards

Hi.
Any interest in doing this, or is this never going to happen ?

I can contribute the code, if ProjectEuler.net's codebase happen to be online.

I would like a small feature added to the site - estimate the difficulty level of each question.
Currently, the only indicator for the difficulty level of each question is the number of people who solved it successfully.
While this is a relatively strong indication, it is not good with relatively new problems.
As people are focusing on problems that they think they can solve, it is also relatively self-increasing - only "popular" problems are being worked on, and the new problems have a very small number of solvers, even if they are less hard the old ones.
If you could show the average level (or number of problems solved) of the people who solved the question, and allow sorting by this parameter in the problems page, it will be awesome. It will help people discover problems that are in their reach, yet not popular as of time being.

Thanks,
--Shachar