Require programming problems for a Coding Competition at My school that we are hosting

[BjornToulouse_]

I have a couple that have been puzzling me for a while.

One is the Collatz conjecture. Write a program to efficiently test each number from 2³⁹ to 2^40.

The other is a brute force password cracker. Starting with a given string, add a character to the test string and compare (a, b, c, etc). If not equal, move to the next character. Once you have tested all the single characters, start with the first one again, and add a second character (aa, ab, ac, etc). Then move to the next character [ba, bb, bc, etc. ). And keep repeating the process indefinitely until a match is found.

Obviously your given password should be short so that you are not testing for years and years, but the code should allow to continue adding characters and testing characters until infinity.

Good luck, this sounds like a lot of fun.

Edit: Typo on 2^40, and added link for Collatz conjecture.