Project Euler Forum

Any chance for a "give up" link for those of us who cannot solve a problem? Some of these problems are way beyond my programming skills, but I would still like to see other people's solutions.

Thanks,
Bassam

Whaaat?!? That'd ruin all the fun! I know that if I had an option, I'd use it wayyy too often and I would hardy learn anything. Besides, the whole point of Project Euler is to learn how to solve these problems. It is expected that some problems will not be solved immediately and the lower numbered problems are there to provide the steps to learning how to solve the harder ones. Fear not, you will get them eventually...just keep working!

True, but then add a surrender option for those that are over a year old or something. There are a few that I've given up on.

@BAbdulBaki :

If someone wishes to cheat, wouldn't the "give up" link make it too easy to do so? (I could use two accounts: one to "give up" on every problem, and one to submit the solutions ).

However, my main objection has nothing to do with cheaters (if they are sufficiently determined, they will find other ways).

The whole idea is to gradually progress developing the necessary knowledge and skills to solve each problem. As far as I can see, it appears that -so far- you have solved less than 60 problems. By the time you have tackled and researched every problem that you can solve and looked carefully at the methods used by other solvers, you will have accumulated enough knowledge and skills to solve some of of those that currently seem to be "beyond your skills"; that would lead to even more problems becoming "solvable" and so on...

Very recently, I solved a proposed problem using a method with O(n²) complexity, which I thought was more than adequate. A couple of months later, another team-member presented results and timings indicating than it could be done in almost O(n). Knowing that it can be solved much more efficiently, gave me a huge incentive to go back and start on it again. And when eventually I found a solution with similar performance, the elation I felt was equally huge.

So, please take my word for it: it's worth persevering...

The idea of two accounts did occur to me. However, I'm not interested in cheating. Due to other interests, I haven't had time to research other people's solutions and use them to improve my own. Besides, almost all of my solutions were done in Excel. I'm still interested in knowing how the other problems were solved, even though I have less time to solve them. Oh well! It was worth a shot.