Ryan J Thompson

This week’s challenge has two easy tasks.

Task 1: Balanced Strings Our first task this week is to take a string matching /^[a-z0-9]$/ and produce the lexicographically smallest string with alternating letters and numbers.

I’ve recently moved all the sites I host to a new server, including ry.ca, and realized it’s been far too long since I wrote a blog post.

Task 1 › Large Numbers The first task this week has us taking a list of numbers and finding the permutation whose concatenation gives the largest number.

(Yes, the title is a reference to the 2006 Zach Snyder film.)

OK, the title might need some explaining: Both tasks this week have us looking through lists of numbers and doubling some of them.

Task 1 – 3rd Maximum Task 1 this week is to take a list of integers and find the 3rd unique maximum value, or if there are fewer than 3 unique values, return the overall maximum.

The tasks this week are nice and quick.

I thought I’d take the rare (for me) step of implementing this week’s challenges in Python as well as Perl.

This week’s tasks have a little bit more meat on their bones, which I quite enjoyed.