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Discussion on: Road to Genius: superior #63

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Ilya Nevolin

It is not intended as a beginners programming guide. If one wants to learn Python/JavaScript/C++ then they are better off taking some conventional course to learn the basics. Codr teaches problem solving, analysis and debugging skills, in the form of challenges and puzzles.

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pentacular

Are you sure?

It seems like the problems can be solved by simple substitution and pattern matching with no real understanding of anything that is going on.

I mean, if you look at your thought processes here ...

It's easy to tell what this should be, since the variable cnts is declared as an array, and the function fill is used with arrays as well. So the most logical answer for 🚀 is to be the class Array. The second bug 💧 should be a number, which says how large the array should be. The possible answers for 💧 are a bunch of random numbers that make little sense, except for "26". The number of letters in the Latin alphabet is exactly 26.

It's just kind of filling in things that aren't obviously wrong until you get something that works.

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Ilya Nevolin

Substitution and pattern matching are strategies used in problem solving.

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pentacular

Very frequently in mindless problem solving. :)

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Ilya Nevolin • Edited

All of our ranked challenges are randomly generated. Some are asking the user to find the answer (some variable value) or fixing several bugs. It is true that some bugs are very trivial to figure out, but sometimes they are not and require an intelligent approach.