Category: Instructor

Posts from Ken.

WSQ 11 – Yo Soy 196

Background

creative commons licensed (BY-NC-ND) flickr photo by K & P: http://flickr.com/photos/kenandpauline/5490820
creative commons licensed (BY-NC-ND) flickr photo by K & P: http://flickr.com/photos/kenandpauline/5490820

Lychrel numbers are natural numbers that do not form a palindrome after successive additions to their inverse. See details on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lychrel_number

What to Do

Your jobs is to create a program that asks the user for two pieces of data:

  • The lower bound of the sequence
  • The upper bound of the sequence
Then you check the values from the lower bound (inclusive) to the upper bound (inclusive) and make a report of them. During the analysis of each number, if a Lychrel number is found it should be reported immediately with something like “Found a Lychrel number: 196”

Details

The report must show:
  • The range of numbers analysed (lower to upper bound)
  • The number of natural palindromes (no addition to inverse needed)
  • The number of non-Lycherels encountered (become palindromes)
  • The number of Lycherel number candidates (that did not converge to palindrome)

Since you will not be able to prove that a number is Lycherel (since you cannot computer forever to check), our definition for a Lycherel candidate will be if a number does not converge after 30 iterations of applying the addition to the inverse.

Hey Ken, my numbers are too small in C++

C++ programmers will want to use a library to support big numbers. I recommend using the C++ Big Integer Library.

I also made a video about this library and you can see it here

Videos about YoSoy196

and if you are interested in getting colours on the terminal:

What to Submit

As usual, create a blog post explaining what you did, where you found resources (books, videos, web pages, friends) to help you solve this. Remember to put the tag #WSQ11 on your post so our blog hub picks that up.

You should include your code as a link to GitHub. You really should start using your GitHub repository now. If you need help on that, just ask Ken or your classmates.

And of course, leave any questions here as well as asking those questions on Twitter with the hashtag #TC101 so we all see your question posted there.

WSQ10 – Lists

What to Do

creative commons licensed (BY-NC-SA) flickr photo by Mark Morgan Trinidad A: http://flickr.com/photos/mmorgan8186/5946796450
creative commons licensed (BY-NC-SA) flickr photo by Mark Morgan Trinidad A: http://flickr.com/photos/mmorgan8186/5946796450

Create a program that asks the user for 10 numbers  (floating point). Store those numbers in a list. Show to the user the total, average and standard deviation of those numbers.

Details

For the Python group, you want to be using Lists. For the C++ group you can do this with arrays or Vectors, but you will need to know eventually how to do both.

Once you have this working, change it so that users keep giving you values until they signal “no more values”. How would you implement this and in particular for the C++ group, how to you deal with an unknown size to your array during compilation?

What to Submit

As usual, create a blog post explaining what you did, where you found resources (books, videos, web pages, friends) to help you solve this. Remember to put the tag WSQ10 on your post so our blog hub picks that up.

You should include your code as a link to GitHub. You really should start using your GitHub repository now. If you need help on that, just ask Ken or your classmates.

If you have not seen my video yet about the GUI tutorial for GitHub, go check that out: http://youtu.be/YQmlksGFZWY

And of course, leave any questions here as well as asking those questions on Twitter with the hashtag #TC101 so we all see your question posted there.