gardner

Brute force solutions to Martin Gardner puzzles

What is this?

I thought it might be fun to code up brute force solutions to a bunch of Martin Gardner puzzles.

Many of these puzzles have very elegant mathematical solutions, but a brute force algorithm is sometimes an easier way to understand or illustrate a concept.

I'm working from The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems; I've numbered them to match so they are easy look up.

I have no idea how many of these I'll work on, probably until I get bored or they get too complicated to be fun with this approach. Feel free to submit new solutions with a PR. Or just take the code and do whatever you want with it.

Getting started

Since these are "proofs", it seemed appropriate to structure the project around assertions. Therefore, I've baked the test cases and solutions into the same file. They use Jest, with a short description of the problem and test blocks containing a description + proof of the solution (one or more, depending how many solutions I wanted to illustrate for the problem).

You need a newer version of Node.js that supports ES6 syntax.

• yarn to get dependencies
• yarn test anytime you want to run the tests, or yarn start to start a watcher that runs them every time the code changes.