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Ask HN: Where can I find coding puzzles that require “out of the box” thinking?

19 points by rayalez ↗ HN
I am aware of the Project Euler. The thing I'm looking for is the puzzles/challenges with the emphasis on "out of the box" thinking, the challenges where the first solution that comes to mind doesn't work, or that strongly encourage searching for unusual/unintended solutions.

Such as 9-dots puzzle, but for programming.

Possibly something that would be to coding/math what "What if?" by xkcd is to physics - crazy questions with extremely unexpected solutions.

If you know about books/websites that collect these puzzles, or you know some good examples yourself - please share them.

If you have any ideas on how I could learn to invent these puzzles myself, or maybe some programming projects that could be a source for a lot of such challenges - please share them too, that would be extremely valuable as well.

P.S. Ideally these puzzles would be small and simple enough to be solvable by a beginner/intermediate programmer, although that is not a strict requirement, more advanced examples are very welcome too.

EDIT: To be clear, these puzzles are for me. To train my brain and have fun and get better at hacking. Not to test or train other people. Well, maybe also to list them on my blog, if I manage to gather a cool collection.

12 comments

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czbond
Really? So you're using these tests as a crutch? The personality type who does well on these may have no correlation to actual work. Even Google has stopped using these. I ask simple "What if" questions, and describe a scenario, sit with a white board, and see their next steps. It shows their strengths, their weaknesses, where they go to first, where they find passion, and where they find dis-interest. That's my approach.
rayalez
I think you've mistaken me for an HR person =) I want these challenges for myself, to get better at programming and to train my creative thinking. And for fun)
czbond
Oh - sorry then. Yes I did - much apologies.
xem
codegolf.stackexchange.com
amagumori
codechef is pretty good for this.
scotty79
Just try to write a program that does anything particular in haskell.

It will require tracing a lot of lines all around the box that's the scope of the task you chosen.

Klockan
I have a hard time understanding what you are looking for, can you give an example of such a programming problem?
seven
Not sure what you are looking for, but I think the security world has many puzzles to offer.

Spot the bug in a given piece of code. Find the problem by looking at the patch. Switch from source to binary if that is too easy.

Or look into reversing. If that gets boring, try reversing some complicated malware.

sova
Well, Clojure is like lisp for the modern era, and learning any lisp language will pretty much totally change the way you think about programming/coding..

So check out www.4clojure.com