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Google code jam solution for alien language

by Christian Harms on Mon, 08/30/2010 - 10:58
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Problem

In the 2009 qualification round there was a simple problem with a nice background story:

After years of study, scientists at Google Labs have discovered an alien language transmitted from a faraway planet. The alien language is very unique in that every word consists of exactly L lowercase letters. Also, there are exactly D words in this language.

Once the dictionary of all the words in the alien language was built, the next breakthrough was to discover that the aliens have been transmitting messages to Earth for the past decade. Unfortunately, these signals are weakened due to the distance between our two planets and some of the words may be misinterpreted. In order to help them decipher these messages, the scientists have asked you to devise an algorithm that will determine the number of possible interpretations for a given pattern.Read more

Christian Harms's picture

The rotate google contest in 15 lines

by Christian Harms on Thu, 08/19/2010 - 12:35
in

The rotate example nico last week reported was funny to solve: No rotating needed! Read the complete problem description in nicos article or in the google code contest page. Here my complete python solution with file handling and solution printing.

  1. import sys
  2. from re import search
  3.  
  4. fp = file(sys.argv[1])
  5. for case in range(1, 1+int(fp.next())):
  6.     n, k = [int(x) for x in fp.next().split()]
  7.     lines = [fp.next() for x in range(n)]
  8.    
  9.     #right-gravitation and joining to one line (delim is a line)
  10.     s = "#".join(map(lambda x:"%%%ds"%n%(x.strip().replace(".","")), lines))
  11.     result = 0
  12.  
  13.     #find one of the 4 variants: horiz, verti, slash, backslash for Blue
  14.     reB = "(B.{%%d}){%d}B" % (k-1)
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