From the article: Programming Challenge 23 - Reassemble Numbered Tiles
Some programming challenges are much more popular than others. Finding out which has been a bit hit and miss, so here's your chance to suggest some or tell other readers what programming challenges you'd like to see. Challenge Everybody
Fastest text hashing
- Given a large list of words, create hash values for each word. Challenge is about speed and producing minimal hash collisions.
- —Guest Ken Backlund
Parallel sorts
- My friends wanted to have a game tournament, and so I had to come up with a "sort" that would find an ordering of objects where each object was found to be "greater" than the next object, but the set was not necessarily ordered (rock-paper-scissors). Worse, comparisons could be done in parallel (one comparison at a time per object) and comparisons took no computer resources but took huge amounts of time. It was a facinating problem that was days of thinking for only a short program, but I don't know how you'd enforce the limitations to make this a contest. It's interesting because a parallel bubble sort has O(n) rounds, but quicksort is roughly still O(nlog(n)). My algorithm sorted 171 players in an average of 14.92 rounds, although it's worst case is O(log(n)+n/2).
- —Guest Ambeco
Repeat problem 28
- Is it possible to repeat programming challenge 28 (An optimization problem-trucking company)? There was only one solution and this is great problem and it really deserves more attention of programmer community here on About.com ...
- —Guest Vladimir
Suggestions
- 1. Computing banzhaf/penrose voting powers (see description of these on wikipedia). 2. Simulation of a circuit consisting of an arbitrary number of logic gates - poss reading connection list and input from file. 3. large number arithmetic in unusual bases. .
- —Guest Jon D
multithreads
- do these challenges allow for multithreaded applications or are we assuming a single core'd system.
- —Guest nathan
Typo
- I think 400 should be on the bottom right. Lalalala.
- —Guest Azam
Arithmetic based challenges
- I would love to see more purely arithmetic based solutions.
- —Guest Josh
On another note
- It might be interesting to have some kind of mailing lists for these programming challenges, maybe an option to include that with submissions, so that people get an email when a new programming challenge starts. I know most will not check the page weekly and i would help to remind people.
- —Guest Martin
Interaction!
- I really like the interaction part of it. specifically the ongoing programming challenges (although #2 that hasn't yet started). I'm all for programming small bots that interact in some form (be it fighting / trading / creating). I also really enjoyed the path finding challenge.
- —Guest Martin
Challenge suggestion
- Pi calculation (most digits in given time, or least time for given number of digits) would make a great challenge.
- —Guest Joshua W.

