>Remember when PLUG actually discussed Linux issues, before turning >into BYUTV (or the 700 Club)? >I miss the good old days :(
I think you have a good point. While I enjoy wild discussions and at times throw in some thoughts that keep them going, I would like to see the higher rate of technical to philosophical. So, I suppose, if you want to see something, you need to take a step towards making it happen. My personal style is to throw out challenges. So here is an algorithmic challenge. Part 1 - easy, you frequently see this in job interviews. Maybe not anymore because everybody knows it. You have a list of N unordered elements that contains unique numbers from 1 to N+1 with one missing. Using the amount of RAM that will be the same regardless of N can you find the missing number in one pass? Hint if you need one - remember how Gauss annoyed his math teacher. Part 2 - harder - can you do this if two numbers are missing? Is your solution robust enough to avoid register overflow? Can you do it without resorting to BigInt arithmetic? -- Sasha Pachev Fast Running Blog. http://fastrunningblog.com Run. Blog. Improve. Repeat. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
