If you’re anything like me, once you learned how to code, you would take any chance you could get to write little programs for fun. I remember once I finally “got” BASIC on my Commodore 64 growing up, I would spend hours writing the cheeziest (looking back) programs. A favorite of mine was writing countless “Question and Answer” programs, where the computer would ask “How are you?” and depending on your answer, the program would issue a different (and probably inappropriate given my age at the time) response.

Time Marches On

As time went on though, and I got better at programming, learned the fundamentals, studied Computer Science – things started to change. I still loved to program, but my goals became larger and more complex. Pet projects would take days to complete, then weeks, then months. Once I started doing it professionally, that added a whole new level, where the projects were for money, and project management, sustainability, fiscal viability, etc, all became factors. I had to specialize and focus on specific areas to remain competitive. And the technology changed – whereas once I was communicating directly with the processor and memory I/O, now I was communicating 17 levels up to a a COM object or framework API. It was just a different ballgame – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes working at such a high level for different purposes can make you lose site of the underlying CS. Sometimes it’s important to keep your CS skills as fresh and sharp as your software engineering ones.

Some Fun Ways to Up Your CS Game

Luckily, there are some sites out there that are awesome for keeping those little grey CS cells active in your head.

Project Euler
This is by far my favorite one. Euler offers a large number of problems (currently 300) that require a computer program to solve. They are generally geared toward mathematics of different levels and areas (generally the higher the problem, the more difficult it is), and you can solve them using any method or programming language you wish. The website keeps track of how many you’ve solved and how you’re faring with the rest of the members, but really you’re competing with yourself to write the best program you can. As you get into later problems, even your efficiency matters, as your first solution might take 3 days to complete, whereas the better one takes .25 seconds. They have discussion forums for each problem as well (once you’ve solved it), where people show their solutions and help each other out. Some example problems on the site:

1. Add all the natural numbers below one thousand that are multiples of 3 or 5.
7. Find the 10001st prime.
15. Starting in the top left corner in a 20 by 20 grid, how many routes are there to the bottom right corner?
109. How many distinct ways can a player checkout in the game of darts with a score of less than 100?
157. Solving the diophantine equation 1/a+1/b= p/10n

As you can see, there are a large range of problems targeting different areas and algorithms. I’ve solved 34 to date – sometimes I’ll spend a lunch hour working on a problem, they’re great fun and you can do them at your own pace – and learn new techniques in the process.

Hack This Site!
No, that wasn’t an invitation! Hack This Site . Org is an interesting site that offers a number of security, reverse engineering, and application development missions. While I’m actually against the practice of unauthorized computer access (especially being a IT Manager by day) – penetration testing is a great thing for a network administrator to know, and reverse engineering is a fantastic thing for a programmer to know. In the high-level development world we now live in, getting back to the processor and memory level is definitely a plus – and studying the binary structure of an executable certainly achieves that. Not only does it strengthen your machine language skills, but it also gives you great insight into how compilers work, how operating systems link DLLs, management memory, and achieve IPC.

Many More

Project Euler and Hack This Site are the two I focus on (and between the two of them, there are enough problems to keep me busy for years), but if they aren’t your cup of tea, here are a list of other programming problem related sites:

Bright Shadows
Electrica
Programming Challenges
Python Challenge
TopCoder

Have fun, and get your CS in shape!

> Open trapdoor
> Go down
> Turn on lantern

I can’t count the number of times I typed the sentences above on my faithful Commodore 64 immediately after getting home from school every weekday afternoon. An explanation to the uninitiated: these simple statements were a way of communicating with a style of game known as “interactive fiction”, or “text adventure”. The particular one that started it all for me was the classic masterpiece known as Zork, where every day I could explore a mysterious underground empire from my room. While the magic of text adventures is an article in itself, after playing Zork once I was completely hooked. Not only did I seek out more adventures to sink my teeth into, I was also lucky enough that my parents purchased a PC for me soon after. From there I discovered the wonder of graphical adventure games, like the Monkey Island series from Lucas Arts and the Kings Quest series from Sierra. From then, and even to this day, I was a complete adventure game junky. No other genre of game could come close to giving me as much enjoyment.

How are adventure games relevant though?

For those who haven’t played an adventure game before, the premise is generally one of accomplishing goals through a series of small tasks. For example, in the popular classic from Lucas Arts, “The Secret of Monkey Island” (spoilers ahead!), at one point in the game it’s necessary to obtain money to purchase a number of items. There isn’t, of course, a pile of money sitting on the ground – that would be too easy. You need to earn it, in this case, from getting paid to get yourself shot out of a cannon at the circus. However, they won’t stick you in the cannon unless you’re wearing a helmet. Guess what? You need to find a helmet, and there is no helmet in the game. There is, however, a cooking pot in the tavern’s kitchen that would fit perfectly on your head. However, you can’t get into the kitchen because the cook won’t let you in…

As you can see, there is a goal (obtain sum of money), and a number of tasks involved in getting there (get into kitchen, get pot, wear it, fire out of cannon). Before you can accomplish a task, there are a number of prerequisite tasks that must be completed first. Each of those tasks has its own set of tasks to complete first, etc. In Computer Science, we call this step-by-step procedure an algorithm.

Algorithms are the heart of programming

Computers, the powerful machines they are, are at their core relatively dumb. They need to be given a list of instructions to follow. They can perform about 4 billion of them a second, but at the end of the day they still need that list of procedures, outlined step-by-step. This is where you, the programmer comes in. Given a goal you wish to accomplish, you must devise a series of steps to lead to that goal, then translate these steps into a language the computer (ultimately) recognizes, such as Visual Basic, C++, or Java.

The same mentality that guides us to get the helmet, to get the cannon, to get the money, is the same process that guides us to be good programmers: to think in steps. A top down approach of taking an overall goal, breaking it into smaller pieces, further dividing each of those pieces into easy steps, until we’ve turned a very large and complex problem into a series of tiny, easy to handle tasks. And sometimes in programming we need to take alternate avenues – just as there is no helmet in Money Island but a cooking pot which makes an excellent substitute, there will be many times in programming where alternative over conventional thinking is necessary to accomplish a goal.

Why adventure games build these skills effectively

The one issue with programming, especially if you’re new to it as I imagine many people reading this article are, is it is a fairly foreign concept. You’re so busy struggling with the syntax of the new language you’re learning that the overall design of the program itself suffers. While this is a necessary part of learning to program, wouldn’t it be great if there were other exercises you could do in the meantime to strengthen your algorithm building skills?

Enter adventure games. They are a great tool to improve your “algorithmic dexterity” as they are enjoyable and usually take place in recognizable situations that you are accustomed to. We all know what a cooking pot is, and we all know we can put it on our head. We know if we turn a lantern on, it’s going to provide light. These are situations we’re used to seeing. However, these common situations put to the extreme focus of step-by-step procedures are what build our instruction-making skills – and adventure games are the absolute masters of requiring this brand of thinking for hours at a time.

So start playing games!

I don’t want to give the wrong impression – learning to program is a lot of hard (but enjoyable!) work, and there are some dry moments when it takes memorization and reading a book/screen. However, when dealing with the flowcharts academia will make you draw out when learning algorithms (a favorite seems to be “Draw out your morning routine!”), or if you’re learning on your own, try supplementing the boring with a little fun. Fire up an adventure game and train your algorithmic brain! Not only will you build a necessary skill, but you’ll also have fun doing it.