Project Euler is a neat website for people who want to bone up on their coding skills and or their math skills.  It’s been quite a while since my brain has been exercised like this, and I’m loving it… the optimizing is very gratifying…

Basically, there are a bunch of math problems that roughly go up in difficulty.  If you can solve a problem, you get access to a thread discussing that problem by people who have already solved it.  Some are straightforward and a little silly (sum all the digits in the number 2^1000, for example), but some of them are pretty challenging, and send you off into number-theory land looking for a way to effeciently count the number of divisors of an big number (say, 78million and change).

People use all sorts of tools in their solving, so it’s not limited to coders… Lots of people have used Excel to solve these things (and boy… if you’ve ever dived into Excel Macros, you’ve done programing…).

Currently, I’ve solved 18 of the first 20 problems.  I’ve got one more 98% solved (except for finding my one-three silly little mistakes, which will probably take me another 98% of the time).  I’ve also got problem #67 solved, because of a note on problem #18… it told me that if I solved the problem wrong, the heat death of the universe would happen before I solved the longer one.  If I did it right, well, let’s just say that my little p3 700MHz firewall solves it in 0.09 seconds.

So, for the three of you readers out there, go and take a look.  Have some fun with it, and who knows, I may even offer some pointers if you get stuck… (assuming I can stay ahead of you…)