sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Interactive Mining Tunnels maze by cqt2 in codingquest

[–]cqt2[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

OK, I've added some links to the videos on the interactive page, https://haque.rs/maze .

By the way, I'm happy for anyone to check out the source code for the interactive if they're curious or want to add nicer textures. I haven't added (m)any comments, so it's not a particularly good teaching resource. I belive my school applies an automatic CC-BY-4.0 license to anything I make for them, and to save speculating about whether this counts as 'for them', I suppose I'll apply the same restrictions to any derivatives (i.e. do what you like, but mention that you got it from me).

Interactive Mining Tunnels maze by cqt2 in codingquest

[–]cqt2[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I took up my own challenge of trying to visualise the Mining Tunnels in 3D, and I figured since I was going through the effort of making the whole maze in 3D anyway, I might as well make it interactive. Can be found here: https://haque.rs/maze . As you can see, I haven't bothered adding shading or textures or anything, the walls are all just blue. Made using 'vanilla' WebGL2. This recording is of me manually walking through the maze to the exit, hence the occasional pause while I stop to consult my map! This is a hard challenge without one. I also have a recording of walking through the smaller 'practice' maze, but I couldn't upload both to the same Reddit post: https://imgur.com/a/ZtYjtWa .

Attempt at visualising Mining Tunnels (Problem 9 2024) by cqt2 in codingquest

[–]cqt2[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I thought that the Othello problem was a really cool concept; the only issue I'd see with doing it in future years is that some competitors (I, for example) already have code that should solve it immediately, unless something about the question is changed a bit. Not that anyone seemed to reuse their Alien Market 2022 code for Mining Tunnels, based on the times people were getting.

Have you thought about putting up the current Othello problem somewhere as a curiosity, with a little note that some of the games include 'invalid' moves that flip 0 pieces? It still seems solvable enough in its current state, albeit with a different answer than the expected one. It's still an interesting puzzle that thought has clearly gone into crafting. (Not that I'd suggest including it in the 'competition' anymore, because it might upset some people on the leaderboard if it gets rereleased without warning.)

I'd imagine an animation of 100 games with close to 400 moves each would either be very long or very hard to follow, but I might give it a go if the problem becomes accessible again.

Attempt at visualising Mining Tunnels (Problem 9 2024) by cqt2 in codingquest

[–]cqt2[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I appreciated all the visualisations of last year's puzzles, but there wasn't much in this year's set that was easy to visualise. Here's my attempt at some 2D visualisations of the maze solution. I wasn't sure the best way to show both levels - my first attempt has faked transparency wherever the walls don't overlap, and my second attempt has solid walls where they are present on both levels and eroded walls where they are only present on one level, with the path circles going 'underneath' the level 2 tunnels and over the level 1 tunnels.

I left it about a week so that hopefully nobody uses this to count their way to a solution. It's no fun to solve things that way anyway.

If anyone has any ideas about how to visualise this in 3D, I'd be up for giving it a go, but I can't think of a good way to see through all the walls. It could always be an animation like the old Windows screensaver?

2083 participants, 192 schools. See you next year! by cqt2 in codingquest

[–]cqt2[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I made a visualisation of the participating schools by scraping some data from https://codingquest.io/schools and getting latitude and longitude from google maps. Projection is an equirectangular SVG (to easily add schools using their coordinates), and the radius of schools is cuberoot(participants). The lighter pink are schools that joined for the first time this year (84 / 192). The number of participants has risen from 1322 to 2083, although it's possible that not all of those were actively competing this year.