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My department is planning to hold a programming contest by the end of Febuary. I just wanted to know if any of you have any interesting problems that could be asked for the contest. The time needed to solve the problems by a reasonably good programmer should be about half an hour.
I would appreciate any interesting programming problems any of you have along with the general procedure to solve them (it would be nicer if you mail the algorithm to me instead of posting it here at least till the end of Feb)
Any sites with these type of problems would be great.(I'm thinking of programs solved with C/C++/Java). Thanks in advance.

If it was me, I'd set an assignment that says, "you have <X> time to write a program to do this" and award a prize for the best/most inventive solution. I think programming puzzles are more of a test of how many books you've memorised and not a good test of how well you can write software.

It has to be done in an hour or so . so that prizes can be given away. Anyone solving the max no of problems correctly is the winner. what do ya think? or is there another sort of contest i could hold?

How about a "make it and break it".

Run the whole thing a one on one tournament, with names drawn out of a hat to decide who has who as an opponent.

Then in each round both contestants must create the program according the specs (Which should say what goes in, what manipulation is meant to be done, and what's expected to come out.) within a certain time limit.

Once they're done making it give each contestant the other person's program and ask them to break it (Ie make it produce bad output).

Mark them on how well it performs with a test sample of data (Speed, accuracy), then take some marks off for every time their opponent can break it. Highest score goes through to the next round.

Have a different problem each round.

hmm.. sounds like a nice idea.
Anyway the reason i posted here was to get some questions to ask them. I have a sort of sample one here attached

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Err... doesn't anyone have any bright ideas? :-\

There's a few challenges at contests.cprogramming.com. But I think with most of them you can either do or you can't. However the compress/decompress program could be interresting. Easy to judge by size of compressed file etc.

Pete

EDIT : Corrected URL

The link does not work any way i'm going through the cprogramming.com site now......Hey Pete u got the URL wrong its contests.cprogramming.com/ Thanks a lot anyway

I have another question about this contest. The contest is to be held in the comp. lab. it may be a one or two hour contest. The participants will have to solve the given questions and then submit the files for me to go through them. So what would be the best way to do this over the LAN? the nodes are running Windows. I was wondering if it was possible to let users use IIS/PWS FTP service to transfer the files to the server and then test them there. Is this a good idea? is there any better way to do this? or do i have to write some software for the file transfer instead of using some sort of FTP service?
btw is there any way to write an app in VC++/VB that just calls the FTP service in the background?
Any ideas welcome

Well......any ideas?? :-\

How about something as simple as saving your files onto a network share?

i dont want the participants reading each others solutions can this be done that way?

Sure, if you set up the permissions correctly.

Give each participant their own directory. I assume they each have their own login ID anyway. On each directory, grant yourself (the organiser) and the participant full access. Don't grant access to anyone else.

ok so this seems to be the easiest way. i've not tried this before so is there anything i should know? What should i do to set this up? etc..

You can do it all through Explorer. Create each of the folders you need. Right-click on each on and click Properties, then the Security tab. What you do from there in depends on what version of Windows you're running, but it should be self-explanatory.