Someone I respect recommended Brilliant to me, and it turned out to be fun indeed; wish I had encountered it sooner.
Lots of little examples, to play with, and to learn from. I was stuck at something else today, so wrote a tiny program for one of these.
The problem is extremely simple (this post is more about using a flexible programming language recreationally, nothing else):
Are there basic arithmetic operators (one of +, -, *, /) that can be inserted into the blanks to get the desired result?
10 __ 10 __ 10 __ 10 = 100
So, a simple, brute-force solution:
(ns clj-playground.core
(:require [clojure.math.combinatorics :as combo]))
(def n 10)
(def ops [+ - * /])
;; Evaluate a given set of operators.
(defn compute
[n opv]
(reduce (fn [v op] (op v n))
n
opv))
;; Generate all possible 3-tuples of operators
(defn all-variations
[]
(mapcat identity
(map clojure.math.combinatorics/permutations
(clojure.math.combinatorics/combinations ops 3))))
(defn find-values [val]
[]
(->> (all-variations)
(map #(vec [% (compute n %)]))
(filter (fn [[o v]] (= v val)))
(clojure.pprint/pprint)))
And to use it:
user> (clj-playground.core/find-values 100)
([(#function[clojure.core/+]
#function[clojure.core/-]
#function[clojure.core/*])
100]
[(#function[clojure.core/-]
#function[clojure.core/+]
#function[clojure.core/*])
100]
[(#function[clojure.core/*]
#function[clojure.core/+]
#function[clojure.core/-])
100]
[(#function[clojure.core/*]
#function[clojure.core/-]
#function[clojure.core/+])
100])
So, there are ways to get there, and here they are.
I know, I know, toy example, but still.