The Enigma puzzles in New Scientist are often programmable.

Like this one;

Classical Centuries
No. 1484 by Adrian Somerfield

Place the letters C, L, X, V and I into a 4 x 4 grid so that each row, column and diagonal forms 10 different valid roman numerals less than CC (columns and diagonals read from the top down). Add the total of the 10 numbers to get a score for the grid.

There should be 12 solutions. Two pairs of solutions have scores differing by C. In one of these pairs the two scores are both divisible by V. What are the scores of the other pair (in roman or arabic numbers)?

( If you want the chance to win £15 email your answer and postal address to enigma@newscientist.com by 9 April but if you just want the coding challenge post it here. Maybe post your code but not the actual answer to stop lazy people entering the competition with your answer. Well the official question was "What were the scores of Robert's pair?" as the pairs differing by C were assigned to Pauline and Robert but that doesn't really matter to the coding challenge. )

what is that - Roman sudoku???

Actually just reading back over that question I think maybe Felix's time would be better spent on his homework :D

I suppose I can't talk. If I weren't such a procrastinator I wouldn't have posted it in the first place.

Naaah, you're not a real procrastinator. If you were, you would have waited until tomorrow to post it.

Lol, I'm up for the challenge, I can always do homework later:D
Besides, homework is only 5% of my grade :p and I have only A's anyways, so far at least (if I get a B, bye bye Mac for a month or so.. lol, my parents are very strict :rolleyes:)
I'll work on it tomorrow, as it's 12:10 AM around here, and I have to wake up at 6:30 Am tomorrow :eek:
I had to stay up late tonight to memorize my perfect, imperfect, and future verb endings for the 3rd, 3rd-io, and 4th conjugations, for my latin I class... got a big quiz tomorrow.. and I forgot to call my gf tonight.. I'm in trouble:rolleyes:..
Night Night :p

This thread has more emoticons than posts. Just sayin'.

:D:(:eek::cool::rolleyes::confused::eek::mad:Whatever do you mean?:):(:p:o;):D:):mad::eek::cool::(:o:confused:

Just try and tell me you didn't ask for that. I feel like a middle schooler all over again...:p:p;):):eek::D

PS--You may or may not be happy to know that the first time I tried to post this, I got a message saying I was only allowed 30 emoticons per post. A very rational limit if you ask me :confused::eek::D

Its gooder to see that English much easy for you, so homework no important.:D...Et tu Latin multus eximius?:p

hmmm... I'll give you the cautionary tale I give to all my undergrad freshman (even though that seems like a million years in the future to you now). getting A's too easily will really cause you problems down the line. you develop bad study habits, walk into a college classroom (which has about the same relationship to a high school class that a high school class has to kindergarten), and you sink like a stone. I see some of the smartest students flounder, where mediocre ones (who are used to struggling for every ounce of knowledge) thrive.

I'm just sayin'... ;)

Right on, tw. I've experienced this both ways; first when I went to university as a straight-A high school student, screwed around, and got suspended for a year (after which, of course, I buckled down), and then later as a prof, department head, and Dean over a 35 year teaching career. The core problem for the good HS student is a complete deficiency in study habits because cramming has always been more than enough.

The spiral is worse now that so many school districts are implementing/have implemented graduation requirements that include passing standardized tests. In Virginia, you cannot graduate without passing the Standards of Learning exam, a standardized test that ignores the curriculum of teachers in the different school districts. As a result, you end up with insightful teachers capable of training their students to think being used instead to teach students to pass tests. It's a modern derelict, if you will.

Students end up being "taught", in a roundabout way, to cram for the tests they need to pass, just to get into college. But what use is higher education at that point?

Just came from school 7 minutes ago.. Let's reply to people ;)

Ok, lol, it was 12:00 AM, and I was tired, I forgot to erase the word "get" when I edited my post.. I erased it now.. Happy :D?
By the way, your latin phrase is way off.. First off, in Latin, the word "Latin", is not "Latin", it's "Latina", hence it's feminine:p
Second off, when you talk to someone, you don't require the word "tu" since the person you're talking to/about is usually deducted from the verb ending, but I guess it's not really wrong especially when you don't even have a verb XD:D.. And unless I'm terribly wrong, eximius means "extremely good" or "extraordinary", and that doesn't really make sense, considering the context.. But you probably wrote it wrong on purpose to poke fun at "moi" :p:)

To tw & NovaScotian
Ok, so I'm not even in highschool yet, I'm in 8th grade, even though I take 11th grade math and 9th grade Latin & Science :p
I'm not saying that i get A's too easily, I'm just saying that I get A's :D.
Though it is true that I could study a little more than I currently am, I usually memorize all the stuff I need as the teacher says it in class, or read it later from the textbook.
In the case of latin where I need to memorize a lot of grammar and vocabulary, that I can't really get it stuck into my head during class, I learn them at home by putting them into little "songs" to the tune of a popular song or so.. I don't know how good of a strategy that is, but it works for me.. I pretty much do the same thing with math with postulates and formulas. For example I memorized the Quadratic formula ((x=-b+/-√((b^2)-4ac))/2a) by putting it to the tune of "Pop goes the weasel" :p...
As of this year, they are also teaching us how to use Cornell (?¿) Notes, and other note-taking methods, to prepare us for high school, which come in handy at times :)
So.. Not sure if what I'm doing is right, but it worked so far.. Please do reply with any comments, advice, and/or words of wisdom :p :)

Oh yea.. SOL's, and the "funnest" thing here in VA... They try to make them hard, but they try too hard :p I've taken the SOL's since I came to US, in 6th grade, and my score was always close to perfection.
This year I've already taken the writing prompt and the writing multiple choice SOL test, pretty easy, but I have a load more of those coming in April and May, that i might need to actually study for ;).
You are right about the fact that most students only study for tests they need to pass.. I generally study for any test or quiz, only if I don't know the stuff, which isn't usually the case.. I generally get the hang of things pretty quickly..
Then again, I'm one of those weirdoes who likes school, and thinks it's actually interesting:p.. What do they call those now a-days:rolleyes:? nerds:D?

(Sorry about the excess of smilies Mikey ;))

Oh oh! As a college student, I can answer this one easily: A nice shiny piece of paper that tells people some college somewhere knows you passed some tests. Gets you the job just about every time, though sometimes it depends on the shininess of the paper. (And even if this is a myth, most college students believe it.)

I graduated high school the year immediately before the SOLs became graduation requirement in VA. I am eternally happy for this, because I do not test well at all. I'd probably still be in class.

You have my sympathies.

Wow, that's pretty lucky of you :)
The SOL's are really long and sometimes you have to wait the whole day for people to finish...

So I'm assuming live(d) in VA then? Just wondering, around what area? Alexandria/DC area? Lynchburg/Richmond area? South VA? I've lived up North in Alexandria and Loudon County for about 2 years... About a week ago I moved south a bit to central VA..

What a shame. When I was in high school in NYC (Fall 50 to Spring 55 :eek:) there were state exams called Regents Exams, and here in most Canadian Provinces there were Provincial Exams that didn't vary much across Canada and so served as somewhat of a national standard. The teachers didn't teach to them, they just taught their curriculum. A rant at this point about the dumbing down of our education is tempting, but I'll forebear.

I used to live in VA, in a few different areas over the course of many years. I camp out in a shack in the middle of Central Park now.

Part of the problem we have with the decline of pedagogy in the United States is that many school district administrators and boards are comprised of people who have never been teachers. They have no idea how to educate people, let alone children, and they never will. Instead of teaching kids how to learn, we end up training them to take exams with no long-term intellectual benefits, or other idiotic curriculum decisions. I cringe every time I read a story about a school board of non-educators (in many places, simply elected community members) telling a teacher how to teach. It's hard to be a good teacher, and the more you tie their hands, the harder it becomes.

By all means, rant away, my man.

RANT on Education Today
 

I don't mean to hijack this thread, but couldn't resist Mikey's invitation:

Having spent 35 years as a professor (who dealt with the products of our school systems), married to an elementary school teacher, and having three grown kids and seven grandkids spread over the east coast of Canada and the US, I do feel qualified to comment somewhat negatively on the state of our (US and Canadian) school systems. There are 6 major issues that have led to the decline of the education of our youth, in my view, but in the interests of brevity, I'll just list them with short explanations -- I could go on at length.

1. School Boards:
At one time school boards had two functions. They were elected to manage and oversee the finances of the the schools in their district (taxpayers money, hence the elected status) and they were responsible for long-term policy and planning for their district (which was to reflect the views of the folks who payed). School administrations ran the schools within guidelines and managed their budgets with some local oversight from the PTA, and, of course, the boards appointed the administrators. Somewhere along the line boards got it into their thick skulls that they knew about and had some purview to consider curriculum content -- an unmitigated disaster for most districts -- a social program gone wild.

2. The Sin of Rote Learning
Little children are sponges -- they can absorb an incredible amount of information and they are extremely observant. Little boys and girls are quite different in many ways (I have 2 girls and a boy plus 5 granddaughters and two grandsons to observe), but they share the ability to memorize almost anything. I can still remember poems memorized in the early grades of my own schooling). Somewhere along the line, it was decided that rote learning was demeaning and that kids (whose logical skills are way behind their memorization skills) should figure out arithmetic for themselves instead of learning their times tables, and the tricks of arithmetic calculation. Result: they need a calculator to do things that I can easily do 5 times as fast in my head. My grandsons took to the times tables as ducks to water -- they thought it was fun and challenging to rattle off quick answers to posed problems. The calculator thing has a huge downside too -- engineering students will write out all the significant figures on their calculator screen even though the input data was only accurate to two or three significant figures and they have virtually no estimation skills. My grandkids have been taught (by us) to round up and down to make the arithmetic easy and give us a guess of the total restaurant bill without seeing the answer (thumb-covered). All of them love to be taught little ditties which they soak up like the sponges they are, and can repeat back anytime. Why schools decided not to emphasize that positive is beyond me.

3. Whole Word versus Sounding It Out Reading.
Modern kids aren't taught to read. Somewhere along the line, some ivory tower education prof decided that "holistic" reading was the way to go, where that means, in simple terms, that readers should recognize whole words. Clearly, adult readers do that, but that's no way to teach it; start with the basics. The problem with that is that they don't learn how to "sound out" new words -- to figure out how to pronounce them from the rules of spelling and the sounds of the letters. Result: they can't spell, and in far too many cases can't read either. Even in Engineering school, they don' t answer the written question. Taught to read before they went to school by their grandmother, all of the grandkids can read damned near anything and spout the parts they understood of it back.

4. The Self-Esteem Fiasco
At some point in the past, school systems seem to have got the fat-headed notion that it was their job to make kids feel good about themselves -- hard comparisons and competition were to be avoided lest we "damage the inner child". They play games in which scores are not kept -- participation is everything. Unfortunately, that's not the way real life is. Grief counseling is a major industry, the news features tearful funerals ahead of world events. What ever happened to a "stiff upper lip"? Half of today's kids seem to be on anxiety drugs -- crutches in my view that mask the necessity to learn who you are and what you can do in a realistic way. Kids are naturally competitive and if you asked early schoolers to line up in the order in which they are good in anything from basketball to arithmetic, they could do it. They know where they stand -- pecking order is innate. The result in my wife's view is that kids get out of school knowing nothing and feeling good about it. To exacerbate this trend, report cards are almost completely vacuous -- full of vague politically correct descriptives instead of grades that measure real performance. To add to the fiasco, kids are promoted in school grades whether they perform or not and they know it, which means that kids who can't read will get nothing at all from the next grade, but they won't be embarrassed by failure -- which is better; to learn the basics or to feel good?

5. Inclusion versus Streaming
It was quite a few years ago when my own kids were in school that (I guess as part of the self-esteem thing) schools stopped streaming students according to their ability. The result, of course, is that you mix bright kids who are bored pallid with dumb kids who don't get it and raise a ruckus. The trend expanded to include kids with mental challenges who had no hope of learning the material but occupied entirely too much of the teacher's time, kids who could prosper in special ed classes are instead stuck in with the rest. Hasn't and doesn't work.

6. The Failure of Merit in Teaching
As a general part of the egalitarian movement in schools, schools have resisted testing because, of course, that would indicate all to clearly who were the good teachers and who should be doing something else for a living. Everyone knows who the duds are, but they survive throughout a career. Principals and school administrators are too often chosen for their politics and political correctness rather than for solid abilities as administrators and educators. Teacher's pay scales are based on their own time in the job and level of education, not on their ability to do the job teaching and maintaining order in their classrooms.

I would add:

7. Uninvolved or defensive parents: My mother was a teacher, and I did some substitute teaching after college. I knew a kid was bound for nowhere when his parent(s) excused bad behavior or claimed that the teacher "didn't like him." If a teacher doesn't like your child, it's because the kid causes problems instead of doing their work.

Judging by your resume, you are qualified.

You listed 6. ;)

I would also add:

8. Failure to value teaching as professional career.
Society demands much while wanting to pay little (nothing new there), and too often dismisses the job as an easy one that provides 12 months of pay for 10 months of work (a misconception that drives my wife crazy).

Regarding point #6, with which I essentially agree, I must admit to being sympathetic to the argument that even a good teacher may seem to be underperforming when the situation is not considered in context - say, in an overcrowded, underfunded, inner-city school. Teachers should be held accountable without being made scapegoats.

There are overpaid, incompetent teachers who are too difficult to replace, and that needs to change. But I think we should be equally concerned about the underpaid, competent teachers who are so difficult to retain. My wife is a case in point; she misses teaching - but not enough to take a substantial pay cut.