Hallo all! I talked about running a periodic puzzle solving contest in the user mailing list to some people in the drools team. They have never done it before so did not know how this contest will come out. However, I was allowed to make the first try. If no body is interested, there won't be any Drools Puzzle #2. Sorry for the spam if you do not like this at all. In the end of this email you can see how I came up with this idea.
So, here is the puzzle for round No. 1: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Difficulty level: settler An old man asked a mathematician to guess the ages of his three sons. Old man said: "The product of their ages is 36." Mathematician said: "I need more information." Old man said:"Over there you can see a building. The sum of their ages equals the number of the windows in that building." After a short while the mathematician said: "I need more information." Old man said: "The oldest son has blue eyes." Mathematician said: "I got it." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This is a simple puzzle, you may not need any computer to solve it. But here are the rules: 1. Solution (the core algorithm) must be written in drools. Any dialect is allowed. Any DSL is allowed. 2. Any kind of user interface is allowed. 3. Make your program as easy to test as possible. Please attach a simple and short readme file about how to build/test/deploy it. 4. The drools team will measure the performance of all submissions on a same computer. 3. The winner will be allowed to post the next puzzle. 4. Any participator, no matter finally win or not, will get points for each participation. Drools team will run a global ranking system and build a hall of fame for all participators. At the end of the year, the one who has most points will be awarded with ( Drools team please fill here, something like a T-shirt or ?). Top ten people in the hall of fame will be awarded with (Drools team please fill here). 5. If there are many, many participators, the Drools team might consider things like "shortest run-time award", "least memory-usage award", "best UI award", "shortest code award", etc. for each puzzle. 6. Currently the puzzle will come once half month. Submission deadline of this round is August 15th, 2007. 7. Please do not post your solution to the user mailing list, since everybody can see your program before the deadline. Drools team please specify an email account to which participators can post solutions. 8. Best/inspiring solutions will be disclosed when next round is on. 9. If any Drools bug is caught during your solving of the puzzle, the Drools team will award you with (Drools team please fill here). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Any constructive advice and suggestion about the rules of Drools Puzzle is welcome. Here is guideline for posting puzzles: 1. You do not want to scare people away with too difficult puzzles or bore people with questions like 1+1=?, so please consider a proper difficulty level for the puzzle. 2. NP-complete or NP-hard is okay. For some NP-hard problems, sub-optimal solutions can be achieved efficiently. But do please tag the difficulty level as something like "veteran", "guru", etc. 3. Complexity aside, there is still scope and testability consideration. Puzzles like "How to integrate my 15 different kind of services objects and my entity home with Drools?" might be algorithmically not difficult, but the application-building can really take a lot of time and energy, and it is not straightforward to test the solution. 4. The purposes of this contest are: 4.1 To learn from each other, enhance our programming skill and learn good algorithms, good implementations. 4.2 To encourage people to explore features of Drools. 4.3 For fun. So your puzzle should not take too much work to solve. It should not mentally or physically torture participators. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This idea was inspired by a "Weekly Challenge" running on dpreview.com user forum and GOTM from http://gotm.civfanatics.net/ On dpreview.com, a subject is posted by the winner of the prior week, people can post their photos to compete. On civfanatics.net, an initial configuration file is posted each month, and gamers submit their end results for ranking. Both of these two non-official contests are running very well, I hope Drools Puzzle will turn out a fun thing too. Regards and nice weekend, Ellen _______________________________________________ rules-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
