Back to Coding and Posting!
By Jonathan Lam on 02/16/16
Tagged: the-homework-life the-homework-life-other
Sorry for the lack of posting in the past few days. I have been busy with other projects, especially with Node.js, an amazing JavaScript platform. It's extremely confusing and frustrating right now, but I'm managing to slowly work my way through and learn some new tricks.
Right now, my main focus as a side project is a card game called "Pa Pei" (literally "hit nose" in Chinese, referring to the penalty for the loser at the end of the game). Play is going to be real-time, fast, and with cool graphics (I messed around with HTML canvas again to dynamically generate cards— it will also help in the future if I want to create new themes). But again, it's complicated, I still need to work out much of the gameplay logistics and finalize the foundation that I've created. I'll try to finish it soon.
However, in the meantime, I would like to announce that I will again attempt Project Euler problems. They are math problems aimed at programming solutions, because they are simply too tedious and time-consuming to do by hand or with a simple calculator. They require complex algorithms— some may take even a modern computer billions to trillions of years if brute-forced (if you try every possible combination). They're interesting and brain-killing.
For example, here is the first one:
If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.
Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.
And here's my solution:
// JavaScript
var sum = 0;
for(var i = 0; i < 1000; i++)
if(i % 3 == 0 || i % 5 == 0)
sum += i;
And the (correct) answer is: 233168.
So I will try and post one of these every day if I can figure one out and if I do not post a regular post. I'm also considering posting about a list of new interesting words as a different type of daily post in order to expand my vocabulary. If I do not post it, the solutions I have will be posted in the as an Extra under Euler.
And lastly, I've added a little feature to the site that I'm anticipating that I will use soon: foreign-language text! Check out the following: