What I Learned Writing Algorithmic Thinking

Hi everyone, I’ve been hard at work on my next programming book. (Sorry, Algorithmic Thinking readers: it’s not a more advanced algorithms book. Maybe one day…) I spend a lot of time on my writing projects, so I wanted to reflect here on why. Perhaps this will be useful to some writer or would-be writer out there. Here are five things I learne... Read more 17 Feb 2021 - 3 minute read

The MooTube USACO Problem Again, But Gold

Hi everyone, Just a quick follow-up note here. Last time, we talked about a USACO graphs problem: the MooTube problem from the Silver January 2018 contest. USACO rounds come in four challenge levels: bronze, silver, gold, and platinum. For a given round, moving to a higher challenge level does one or both of two things: presents an entirely d... Read more 31 Jan 2021 - 3 minute read

Solving a USACO Problem, MooTube Silver

Hi everyone, I recently found a USACO problem that fits in really well with the material from Chapter 4. I included in the book one of my favourite USACO problems, but there are so many more to look at. … like this one! It’s a graphs problem, and you can use breadth-first search to solve it. (True but pointless story: USACO problems almost al... Read more 20 Jan 2021 - 5 minute read

Solving another AtCoder Problem, Leaping Tak, Final Solution

Hi everyone, Time to solve last week’s AtCoder problem. Check out the post from last week for a refresher. You’ll recall that we used memoization to design a correct solution, but one that was too slow to pass all of the test cases. I hinted at the end of the post that we were spending too much time processing the effects of large jump distan... Read more 09 Jan 2021 - 8 minute read

Solving another AtCoder Problem, Leaping Tak

Hi everyone, I’ve really been having fun with AtCoder lately. In a previous post, I talked about the AtCoder Beginner Contest (ABC). They run a lot of these contests. Do check them out if you have time; I’ve found that at least one or two problems in each contest tend to align well with what we’re doing here. Today, we’ll take a look at the Le... Read more 30 Dec 2020 - 8 minute read