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Posted by swatson741 11/12/2025

Project Euler(projecteuler.net)
566 points | 134 commentspage 3
zkmon 11/12/2025|
A great one of my favorite websites of the past. Wonder how they are coping with the issue of their users using AI to solve problems.
Schiphol 11/12/2025||
I suppose I wonder how those users are coping with having the robots do all the stuff instead of them doing some of the stuff.
bee_rider 11/13/2025||
It is a mostly single player game, if users want to cheat they are only cheating themselves really, right?
mpcsb 11/13/2025||
I thank project Euler because whenever I face some coding challenge that has any mathematical inclination, I will(!) impress interviewers. I spent a lot of time on it, and learned a considerable amount of theory and hacks. What a privilege to be able to do this, instead of digging the fields and other manual labor. Thanks culture!
phil-pickering 11/12/2025||
I think a hat-tip is due to freeCodeCamp for introducing Project Euler (along with Rosetta Code) to a new generation of programmers:

https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/project-euler/#project-eu...

fiftyacorn 11/13/2025|
i think its a decent environment to do the programs - ok restrictive to js but lets you focus on the problems
varyherb 11/13/2025||
Project Euler spurred my love for math and programming when I was 15. I got through the first few with pencil and paper and then quickly realized I was going to need to learn how to program. Got started with Java (in Eclipse) and then moved on to Python. I feel like it completely changed the trajectory of my life.
davidhariri 11/12/2025||
I learned so much from this site- including that so much education comes from being prompted to ask the right questions.
schlauerfox 11/12/2025||
I love a good puzzle solving club. Some of my favorites: https://www.themastertheorem.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplex_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindTrap
lll-o-lll 11/13/2025||
Whelp, the opening “problem zero” stuffed me up.

> A number is a perfect square, or a square number, if it is the square of a positive integer. For example, is a square number because ; it is also an odd square. The first 5 square numbers are: , and the sum of the odd squares is . Among the first 881 thousand square numbers, what is the sum of all the odd squares?

I wanted to use Uiua, and hence:

/+ⁿ2+1⍜÷⇡ 2 881000

But Uiua doesn’t support big ints, just f64. So yuck, python to get an accurate answer. Just sad now.

wodenokoto 11/13/2025||
How did you get to problem 0? When I look at the list of problems it starts at 1: https://projecteuler.net/archives
lll-o-lll 11/13/2025||
It’s the “sign up” challenge
janislaw 11/13/2025||
This will become a practice of implementing bignums in your language of choice, which is a valuable exercise itself.
gcanyon 11/13/2025||
I did this (bignum) library for Livecode specifically for PE. https://github.com/gcanyon/bignum
robert-zaremba 11/13/2025||
During my university time, I used to do a lot of different programming puzzles and algo. I think it an invaluable training that every serious engineer should try without relaying on AI.

Skills are trained by practice and thinking. Skilled people will never be subsidized by AI. Unskilled juniors, who don't train properly will go into tranches (as it's already happening).

pkoird 11/12/2025||
I remember it vaguely but there used to be a badge awarded for being among the first 100 people to solve the problem. I was obsessed with getting that badge to the point that I spent obscene amount of time solving the-then recently released problem even when the following day was my final exams. I did manage to get that badge though. This was circa 2013. Fun times!
graycat 11/12/2025|
Glanced at the exercises. It appears that two of them have numbers arranged in a triangle and ask for a longest path.

Hmm. Given such a triangle, let m be the largest number in the triangle. For each x in the triangle, replace it with m - x. For the resulting triangle, solve it to give the shortest path using one of the well known network shortest path algorithms.

thaumasiotes 11/12/2025||
> Hmm. Given such a triangle, let m be the largest number in the triangle. For each x in the triangle, replace it with m - x.

By the time you've actually done these two steps, you could have already finished the problem with a dynamic programming approach.

(Starting from the bottom row and working upward, replace each cell in the row with the length of the longest path from itself to the bottom, which you can know by checking which of its two children has the longer path associated.)

n4r9 11/13/2025||
The "well known" path algorithms in this case are overkill; the graph is a tree. And Dijkstra is not really designed to handle negative edge weights (although it would probably function correctly in this instance).
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