How many years do you have in the IT Industry? Submit & Apply now!

[Rance]

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Enjoy programming puzzles? So do we.

You may use any of the following programming languages:
C++
Java
JavaScript
OCaml/SML
Perl
PHP
Python
For extra credit, you may submit additional solutions in the other languages as well as solutions in languages not listed here.

Explain and share your code and solutions in this thread. To those who are looking for a technical job in the USA please PM me your profile and your resume. Thank you

Have fun

[Rance]

Now here comes the first puzzle:

Bare Arms

You are a cop responsible for maintaining peace in a neighborhood with lots and lots of houses.

These houses are neatly arranged in a grid so that each house shares a boundary wall with at most 3 other houses and can have at most 1 house directly across the street. All the activities happening in a house can be observed from the house directly across the street or from the houses that share a common boundary wall.

The occupants of these houses are all big-time gangsters. They constantly fight with each other and carry guns, which they keep in their living room. However, whenever they see a policeman visiting a house (obviously a house that they can observe from their own house), they get scared and bury their guns in their basement. On the other hand, if they already had the guns buried in their basement, they immediately dig them out as they think that the police visited the neighbor's house because the neighbor had guns in their living room. Your job as a cop is to visit the houses in such a way that the neighborhood reaches a state where the maximum number of occupants of the houses have buried their weapons in the basement rather than having them in their living rooms.

Using your mighty powers of police surveillance, you know at any time exactly who has their guns in the living room and who has their guns buried in the basement.

Note that when you visit a house the occupants of that house do not move guns around. They simply let you check the living room and you write them a ticket in case you found the guns there. You do not confiscate their guns.

Your program should take two parameters n and m. These are the dimensions of the neighborhood, n being the number of houses in a single row of the grid and m being the number of houses in a single column of the grid. Therefore, the total number of houses in the neighborhood is n*m. The houses are numbered in the row major format.

An example of a grid of houses with n = 4 and m = 7 is shown below:

1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28

Your program should accept a file containing whitespace- and/or newline-separated integers consisting of n, m, and a list of the house numbers which currently have guns in their living room (at the beginning of your patrol, none of the guns are buried).

For the above example, a file may look like the following:
4
7
10
25
2
16
4
8
26
23

You should not assume that each number will be on its own line, and in general your input parsing should be extremely robust. Programs which fail to parse very large files or sets of inputs which are messily arranged will be considered failures. The following input file would also have been valid:

4 7 10
25
2 16 4 26
23

[Rance]

Any talented programmer or analyst around here who's up to the challenge to solve and show us your solutions to the sample problem? show us your skills in programming, your expertise that separates you than the average joe here. If you are worth it then we'll give you the opportunity to work with us, young minds with great vision cutting edge technology! If you don't want to share it here then you can PM it to me together with your resume and domain expertise. Thanks

[moz_k2]

I bet this is one of the few job puzzles posted in facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/jobs_puzzles/?puzzle_id=10

[Rance]

I bet this is one of the few job puzzles posted in facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/jobs_puzzles/?puzzle_id=10

I used it as reference.. for comparison here.. there are other puzzles I can give it for you if you want easier. Anyway, are you looking for a job?

If you answer yes then, What is your domain expertise? How many total IT years experience? Do you have any certifications? Do you have masters degree? (not required but a big advantage) PM me your profile if you are interested. Thanks

[Rance]

Some of you here send me a PM thanks...but for those who are interested who has the skills and confidence. You can send me your solution in txt format (please observe coding convention standard so that we can read and understand your code) also provide a logic explanation on why and how did you construct your methods, classes, design patterns and the structure the way you want it. Let me add to this that there is no wrong answers and there's no dumb code for this puzzle.. it's the logic and explanation matters.

On the other hand, please send to me your detailed resume (not more than 3 pages word doc, font size 10, use arial or times new roman fonts) and highlight only the following and please make it short:

- Your Position and a brief description your specific job responsibilities, company name, duration
- describe the project that you worked on, how many teams/components are involve
- describe the technology and tools you used on each project
- and all other significant information like certifications, training, masteral if any

That's all. Email to getaccesstoday@gmail.com I will take a look at it and we will let you know if we have something for you.

Thank you very much.

[javapenguin]

What is your domain expertise? How many total IT years experience? Do you have any certifications? Do you have masters degree? (not required but a big advantage) PM me your profile if you are interested. Thanks

Hmmm.. Is BS degree required?

[Rance]

I've known several professionals who were not a graduate a bachelors degree holder or perhaps in Computer Science.. some of them were BS Math and some of them are Electrical or Electronics graduate but they were very good in programming and they excel in the field of IT. I believe that a good educational background can also give you an advantage in the field.. I'm not saying you are not good enough but what I'm saying is that having a Bachelors degree or perhaps masters degree is a big of an advantage in the job market.. those blue chips companies are sometimes give a higher ratings on a candidate for having the fundamental educational background on top of the experience. I hope it answers your question.

[javapenguin]

I've known several professionals who were not a graduate a bachelors degree holder or perhaps in Computer Science.. some of them were BS Math and some of them are Electrical or Electronics graduate but they were very good in programming and they excel in the field of IT. I believe that a good educational background can also give you an advantage in the field.. I'm not saying you are not good enough but what I'm saying is that having a Bachelors degree or perhaps masters degree is a big of an advantage in the job market.. those blue chips companies are sometimes give a higher ratings on a candidate for having the fundamental educational background on top of the experience. I hope it answers your question.

Well said, thanks.

[javapenguin]

How many recruits so far?