CoolBeans: From College to Industry

There were a few less takers for this one than the others, it seems the complexity of the problem may have been a little high for an Internet competition. None the less, let's plow through what a good answer is. First, the point of this one was...

As several people commented on yesterday's post , the most common answer is -536870912 (0xE000000 in memory) That's because: most compilers implement arithmetic shift , even though they don't have to and most PCs are x86 32-bit. The point was to...

So I'm here at RIT and talked my guts out about Microsoft, PowerPoint and industry after college. After an hour and a half I think we finally ran out of slides (there were only 25 in all) and questions (well over 25). Thanks to everyone who came, I will...

Not many people responded to last week's puzzle , so I'm going to leave it open for another week. In the mean time, take a crack at this. Here's something many of us would have written in college. Take a look at the code and see if you can spot what...

Just implement this function for all values: float GetStockPrice( char * sym, int date ); Some things are impossible, and it's good to recognize them. The tricky part is most impossible ideas are not as clearly defined at the function level. For...

I'm on my way to New York and the in flight movie is Miss Potter . I've taken the headphone jack out of its socket several times while trying to stomach this movie. I honestly have no idea what's going on. They are speaking English, but somehow nothing...

This week’s contest is to direct a chess knight around a maze. Your job is to find the exit by only using knight moves and by not moving over any walls. The knight must land on the exit to exit the maze. Rules Implement the following function given...

All work and no play means bugs. Ever sit in a computer science lab and suddenly hear a loud WHACK!! as someone does something destructive to their keyboard? This is the "The computer is pissing me off" signal. Other signals include hitting the keyboard...

Here’s my answer to last week’s contest : struct Node { Node **links; // pointers to other nodes // links[n] will never be NULL // 0 <= n < numLinks int numLinks; // number of links int color; // initialized to 0, // yours...

Just a note, today was a very busy day. Let's just say a lot got done on the Chris Becker front. I will post the contest results when I can. A bunch of good entries this time again!

I’m flying home on a jet, there’s a lot of noise from the engines and people talking. I’m wearing a good pair of headphones which have a noise cancelling feature turned on and I’m listening to music. Then there’s a noise, like the sound the wings make...

This week’s contest will be to determine if a graph is 2-colorable. “2-colorable” means that all nodes can be colored with one of two colors such that two nodes that are linked together do not have the same color. Below are examples of graphs which...

I'm here at Imagine Cup giving demos and showing off our cool products. Having people come up to you and say “Wow, I really love what you’ve done with it!” is a real thrill. I even had people come up saying “PowerPoint? Doesn’t that suck?” only to be...