TheCodedWorld

A new Codility challenge (codename Tau) has been launched. I had a quick look at it just now but am way too tired to give it a go. Feel free to beat me to it! It involves a torus represented as a vector of vectors. Go for the gold at http://www.codility.com (click on the "Certify yourself" button).

Just scored 100% on the new cert task on Codility. Won't give you the solution just yet :). Certificate is here:  http://codility.com/cert/view/certZJHZPQ-S4MJ88Z7C9YEC4ED Might look a bit odd that I completed the task in 1 min but it was my second attempt so I already had the code prepared. Like a tv chef!

Now, the second codility task I was faced with was a bit tougher. The goal was to create a function that, given a vector of integers A and an integer K, returned the number of integer pairs in the vector that, when added, sums up to K. Let me give you an example. Assume that you are given a vector A = [0, -1, 3, 2, -5, 7] and K = 2. Possible combinations to get K are (0, 2), (-1, 3), (3, -1), (2, 0),  (-5, 7), and (7, -5). In other words, the function should return 6. Now, how did I solve this task? The first solution that came to mind involved nested for-loops. The outer loop picking one integer at the time from the vector and the inner loop adding the integer to the others one by one to see if the result is K. This solution works, but it does not scale well. Time complexity will be O(N**2) ,   something that for large vectors will result in very long execution times. My second approach was to use my old friend, the integer counter, and count all occurences of each...

I was recently faced with two codility tasks when applying for a job as an Embedded Software Engineer. For those of you who arn't familiar with Codility you can check out their website here:  www.codility.com Task one - Dominator The first task was called Dominator. The goal was to, given a std::vector of integers, find an integer that occurs in more than half of the positions in the vector. If no dominator was found -1 should be returned. My approach was to loop through the vector from the first to the last element, using a std::map to count the number of occurences of each integer. If the count ever reached above half the size of the vector I stopped and returned that integer and if I reached the end without finding a dominator I returned -1. So was that a good approach? Well, the reviewer at the company rated the solution as 'pretty ok'. His preferred solution was store the first integer in the array and set a counter to 1. Then loop through the remaining i...