Codebreaker

I think this is a great speech. I hope one day I become another person who can say those thing in front of people. In the speech, Steve Jobs gave me some clues that lead me to an answer that I’ve been looking for a long time. Jobs said,

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Even though the statement he made was highly abstract and conceptual, it forced me to re-think about everything I was doing and I have been doing. Ever since I decided to study computer science, I thought I already knew what I want to do. But there were too much of noise from others, temptations and uncertainties. Computer science is indeed a broad subject and it doesn’t define me. It is just one of things I am interested in.

I don’t think anyone else can answer to this question for me; what do I really want to become? If someone else answers to the question, it’s probably not what I truly want to become. Thus I shall be the one who ultimately answers to the question, and hopefully not too late.

Problem #20 is to find the sum of the digits in the number 100!

This can be easily solved with Python as the math package comes with factorial function.

from math import factorial
reduce(lambda x, y: int(x)+int(y), str(factorial(100)))

A friend of mine, Leon, told me about the Project Euler. One of the problems is to find the greatest product of five consecutive digits in the 1000-digit number.

73167176531330624919225119674426574742355349194934
96983520312774506326239578318016984801869478851843
85861560789112949495459501737958331952853208805511
12540698747158523863050715693290963295227443043557
66896648950445244523161731856403098711121722383113
62229893423380308135336276614282806444486645238749
30358907296290491560440772390713810515859307960866
70172427121883998797908792274921901699720888093776
65727333001053367881220235421809751254540594752243
52584907711670556013604839586446706324415722155397
53697817977846174064955149290862569321978468622482
83972241375657056057490261407972968652414535100474
82166370484403199890008895243450658541227588666881
16427171479924442928230863465674813919123162824586
17866458359124566529476545682848912883142607690042
24219022671055626321111109370544217506941658960408
07198403850962455444362981230987879927244284909188
84580156166097919133875499200524063689912560717606
05886116467109405077541002256983155200055935729725
71636269561882670428252483600823257530420752963450

Here’s my one-line Python solution. l is a string that contains all 1000 digits above.

max(map(lambda a,b,c,d,e: int(a)*int(b)*int(c)*int(d)*int(e), l[:-4], l[1:-3], l[2:-2], l[3:-1], l[4:]))

Python for the win!