Oversized Pancake Flipper - Google Code Jam

Google Code Jam

If you're a programmer and you don't know Google Code Jam, you should definitely go and check that. It's basically a coding competition, I like to call it "the programming olympics".

It's about 4 or 5 years I'm participating, I love it because it challenges my coding skills, and I'm not talking about "making a for loop".

This year I want to share my solutions of the problems, let's start with the first and the easiest one.

The problem

Here the complete problem text.

You have a row of pancakes and a strange flipper, you have to find the right combination to make them show their happy side.

At first I thought it could be easy: just flip the unhappy pancakes and see what happens.

"This is a competition, the solution can't be so simple!" - my inner voice said. So I proceeded to the other problem to see if they were simpler, after those I came back.

The solution

Facing the problem again, I had no other ideas but the first one. I decided to give it a try.

You can find the code here, but let me explain some part of it.

To ease the following steps, I get the first part of the input line.split()[0] and I convert the pancake row in a list of binary items.

# ... pancake_row = [p == '+' for p in line.split()[0]] # ... 

The list comprehension says something like "for every character in the string, create an item with True value if the character equals +, False otherwise"
List comprehension are very powerful, here is the code without it:

pancake_row = list() for p in line.split()[0]: pancake_row.append(p == '+') 

Then i go through the list looking for a pancake to flip, now that every item is a boolean, I can check them with a simple if:

# ... pan_size = int(line.split()[1]) # ... while i < (len(pancake_row) - pan_size + 1): if not pancake_row[i]: # ... 

Now I put the flipper starting from the first unhappy pancake and then flip.

pancakes: ---+-++- flipper: *** flipped: ++++-++- 

To make it in the code, I just have to not the items: not False == True:

# ... while i < (len(pancake_row) - pan_size + 1): if not pancake_row[i]: for j in range(i, i + pan_size): pancake_row[j] = not pancake_row[j] # ... 

I think I could have done it using slicing:

# ... while i < (len(pancake_row) - pan_size + 1): if not pancake_row[i]: j = i + pan_size pancake_row[i:j] = [not p for p in pancake_row[i:j]] # ... 

Going on with the example, the pancake row evolution should be the following:

---+-++- *** ++++-++- *** +++++--- *** ++++++++ 

With this example we're lucky, because at the end all the pancakes are happy. We can check it using a special Python function (you don't have to reinvent the wheel):

# ... all(pancake_row) # ... 

all()

Return True if all elements of the iterable are true

If the pancakes are not all on the happy side, we can argue that it's impossible: the unhappy pancake should be at the end of the row, there's no way flip them without flipping the previous pancakes.

What I learnt

My intuition was right... I was right! (not my inner voice).

So next time I could give it a try sooner.