Last weekend we held the Final of InterSystems Contest on InterSystems Caché and DeepSee as a part of IT Planet Student Championship in Sochi. BTW, this year we had about 2 000 participants in InterSystems Contest.
Today's challenge is about decompressing input that is compressed in an experimental format. In the format, markers indicate how much time a number of characters need to be repeated.
The input in today's challenge consists of an encrypted name, a dash, a sectorID, a dash and a checksum between brackets. A name is real if the checksum is equal to the five most common letters in the encypted name.
The challenge of day 5 is to calculate a password of 8 characters by finding the MD5 hash of the input and an increasing integer index. The password is constructed by taking the 6th character of the first 8 hashes that start with 5 zeroes (in hex representation).
The challenge today is about some basic cryptography : you will have to generate data for a one-time pad (OTP) (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad for more info).
The challenge of day 16 is about generating random data using a modified version of a dragon curve (you can find more info on fractal curves like Dragon here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_curve).
Advent of Code is a series of 25 small programming challenges, it's an ideal way for beginners to start learning a computer language, and for advanced people to sharpen their programming skills.
There are small and bigger puzzles, which you can solve typically in half an hour to a few hours. (Looking at the leaderboard, the top aces can do them in less than 10 minutes.)