Programming Praxis

You have to hire a new programmer from a pool of 100 applicants. One method is to interview all 100 and hire the best, but that takes a while. Mathematicians have developed the 37% rule:

Examine 37% of the candidates, knowing in advance you will not select any of them. Then examine the remaining candidates one-by-one, choosing the first of them that is better than any of the first 37%.

Your task is to simulate this process and determine how close you get to the optimal candidate. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

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I hate businesses with telephone numbers that spell words; it’s awkward to type letters at a telephone, and often the words are abbreviated or spelled wrong so they are no longer mnemonic, which defeats the purpose. So this morning when I had to call one of those businesses, I wrote a program to translate letters to numbers after I had been waiting on hold long enough to get really annoyed.

Your task is to write a program to translate telephone numbers specified as words. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

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Counting from the end of the list, the third-last item in the list (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9) is 7.

Your task is to write a program to find the nth-last item in a list; you must provide at least three fundamentally different solutions. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

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For many students, school started a few weeks ago, so today’s exercise is typical of homework:

1. Write a program to determine the length of a linked list.
2. Write a program to reverse a linked list.

Your task is to write the two list exercises described above; write them as if you are three weeks into your first data structures class. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

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Today’s exercise is a mind-boggling card trick:

Create a pack of 52 cards, half red, half black, and shuffle them. With the cards face down, turn over the top card. If it is black, add the next card, unseen, to the black stack; if it is red, add the next card, unseen, to the red stack. Add the original top card to the discard stack. Repeat these steps for all the cards in the pack. Now, randomly choose a number less than the size of the smaller of the black and red stacks, choose that many cards randomly from each of the two stacks, and swap those randomly-chosen cards from one stack to the other. The number of black cards in the black stack will equal the number of red cards in the red stack.

Your taks is to write a program to simulate the card trick and confirm that the number of black cards in the black stack equals the number of red cards in the red stack. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

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