This is a repository of my foobar contest submissions
Because Commander Lambda is an equal-opportunity despot, she has several visually-impaired minions. But she never bothered to follow intergalactic standards for workplace accommodations, so those minions have a hard time navigating her space station. You figure printing out Braille signs will help them, and – since you’ll be promoting efficiency at the same time – increase your chances of a promotion. Braille is a writing system used to read by touch instead of by sight. Each character is composed of 6 dots in a 2×3 grid, where each dot can either be a bump or be flat (no bump). You plan to translate the signs around the space station to Braille so that the minions under Commander Lambda’s command can feel the bumps on the signs and “read” the text with their touch. The special printer which can print the bumps onto the signs expects the dots in the following order:
Solution - Here
Being a henchman isn't all drudgery. Occasionally, when Commander Lambda is feeling generous, she'll hand out Lucky LAMBs (Lambda's All-purpose Money Bucks). Henchmen can use Lucky LAMBs to buy things like a second pair of socks, a pillow for their bunks, or even a third daily meal!
However, actually passing out LAMBs isn't easy. Each henchman squad has a strict seniority ranking which must be respected - or else the henchmen will revolt and you'll all get demoted back to minions again!
There are 4 key rules which you must follow in order to avoid a revolt: * 1. The most junior henchman (with the least seniority) gets exactly 1 LAMB. (There will always be at least 1 henchman on a team.) * 2. A henchman will revolt if the person who ranks immediately above them gets more than double the number of LAMBs they do. * 3. A henchman will revolt if the amount of LAMBs given to their next two subordinates combined is more than the number of LAMBs they get. (Note that the two most junior henchmen won't have two subordinates, so this rule doesn't apply to them. The 2nd most junior henchman would require at least as many LAMBs as the most junior henchman.) * 4. You can always find more henchmen to pay - the Commander has plenty of employees. If there are enough LAMBs left over such that another henchman could be added as the most senior while obeying the other rules, you must always add and pay that henchman.
Solution - Here
You've been assigned the onerous task of elevator maintenance - ugh! It wouldn't be so bad, except that all the elevator documentation has been lying in a disorganized pile at the bottom of a filing cabinet for years, and you don't even know what elevator version numbers you'll be working on.
Elevator versions are represented by a series of numbers, divided up into major, minor and revision integers. New versions of an elevator increase the major number, e.g. 1, 2, 3, and so on. When new features are added to an elevator without being a complete new version, a second number named "minor" can be used to represent those new additions, e.g. 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, etc. Small fixes or maintenance work can be represented by a third number named "revision", e.g. 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.2.0, and so on. The number zero can be used as a major for pre-release versions of elevators, e.g. 0.1, 0.5, 0.9.2, etc (Commander Lambda is careful to always beta test her new technology, with her loyal henchmen as subjects!).
Given a list of elevator versions represented as strings, write a function answer(l) that returns the same list sorted in ascending order by major, minor, and revision number so that you can identify the current elevator version. The versions in list l will always contain major numbers, but minor and revision numbers are optional. If the version contains a revision number, then it will also have a minor number.
Solution - Here
You're awfully close to destroying the LAMBCHOP doomsday device and freeing Commander Lambda's bunny prisoners, but once they're free of the prison blocks, the bunnies are going to need to escape Lambda's space station via the escape pods as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, the halls of the space station are a maze of corridors and dead ends that will be a deathtrap for the escaping bunnies. Fortunately, Commander Lambda has put you in charge of a remodeling project that will give you the opportunity to make things a little easier for the bunnies. Unfortunately (again), you can't just remove all obstacles between the bunnies and the escape pods - at most you can remove one wall per escape pod path, both to maintain structural integrity of the station and to avoid arousing Commander Lambda's suspicions.
You have maps of parts of the space station, each starting at a prison exit and ending at the door to an escape pod. The map is represented as a matrix of 0s and 1s, where 0s are passable space and 1s are impassable walls. The door out of the prison is at the top left (0,0) and the door into an escape pod is at the bottom right (w-1,h-1).
Write a function solution(map) that generates the length of the shortest path from the prison door to the escape pod, where you are allowed to remove one wall as part of your remodeling plans. The path length is the total number of nodes you pass through, counting both the entrance and exit nodes. The starting and ending positions are always passable (0). The map will always be solvable, though you may or may not need to remove a wall. The height and width of the map can be from 2 to 20. Moves can only be made in cardinal directions; no diagonal moves are allowed.
Solution - Here
You're so close to destroying the LAMBCHOP doomsday device you can taste it! But in order to do so, you need to deploy special self-replicating bombs designed for you by the brightest scientists on Bunny Planet. There are two types: Mach bombs (M) and Facula bombs (F). The bombs, once released into the LAMBCHOP's inner workings, will automatically deploy to all the strategic points you've identified and destroy them at the same time.
But there's a few catches. First, the bombs self-replicate via one of two distinct processes: Every Mach bomb retrieves a sync unit from a Facula bomb; for every Mach bomb, a Facula bomb is created; Every Facula bomb spontaneously creates a Mach bomb.
For example, if you had 3 Mach bombs and 2 Facula bombs, they could either produce 3 Mach bombs and 5 Facula bombs, or 5 Mach bombs and 2 Facula bombs. The replication process can be changed each cycle.
Second, you need to ensure that you have exactly the right number of Mach and Facula bombs to destroy the LAMBCHOP device. Too few, and the device might survive. Too many, and you might overload the mass capacitors and create a singularity at the heart of the space station - not good!
And finally, you were only able to smuggle one of each type of bomb - one Mach, one Facula - aboard the ship when you arrived, so that's all you have to start with. (Thus it may be impossible to deploy the bombs to destroy the LAMBCHOP, but that's not going to stop you from trying!)
You need to know how many replication cycles (generations) it will take to generate the correct amount of bombs to destroy the LAMBCHOP. Write a function solution(M, F) where M and F are the number of Mach and Facula bombs needed. Return the fewest number of generations (as a string) that need to pass before you'll have the exact number of bombs necessary to destroy the LAMBCHOP, or the string "impossible" if this can't be done! M and F will be string representations of positive integers no larger than 10^50. For example, if M = "2" and F = "1", one generation would need to pass, so the solution would be "1". However, if M = "2" and F = "4", it would not be possible.
Solution - Here
In order to destroy Commander Lambda's LAMBCHOP doomsday device, you'll need access to it. But the only door leading to the LAMBCHOP chamber is secured with a unique lock system whose number of passcodes changes daily. Commander Lambda gets a report every day that includes the locks' access codes, but only she knows how to figure out which of several lists contains the access codes. You need to find a way to determine which list contains the access codes once you're ready to go in.
Fortunately, now that you're Commander Lambda's personal assistant, she's confided to you that she made all the access codes "lucky triples" in order to help her better find them in the lists. A "lucky triple" is a tuple (x, y, z) where x divides y and y divides z, such as (1, 2, 4). With that information, you can figure out which list contains the number of access codes that matches the number of locks on the door when you're ready to go in (for example, if there's 5 passcodes, you'd need to find a list with 5 "lucky triple" access codes).
Write a function solution(l) that takes a list of positive integers l and counts the number of "lucky triples" of (li, lj, lk) where the list indices meet the requirement i < j < k. The length of l is between 2 and 2000 inclusive. The elements of l are between 1 and 999999 inclusive. The answer fits within a signed 32-bit integer. Some of the lists are purposely generated without any access codes to throw off spies, so if no triples are found, return 0.
For example, [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] has the triples: [1, 2, 4], [1, 2, 6], [1, 3, 6], making the answer 3 total.