This repo contains a dataset of python programming puzzles which can be used to teach and evaluate an AI's programming proficiency. We hope this dataset with grow rapidly, and it is already diverse in terms of problem difficult, domain, and algorithmic tools needed to solve the problems. Please contribute!
Each puzzle takes the form of a python function that takes an answer as an argument.
The goal is to find an answer which makes the function return True.
This is called satisfying the puzzle, and that is why the puzzles are all named sat.
def sat(s: str):
return "Hello " + s == "Hello world"The answer to the above puzzle is the string "world" because sat("world") returns True. The puzzles range from trivial problems like this, to classic puzzles,
to programming competition problems, all the way through open problems in algorithms and mathematics.
A slightly harder example is:
def sat(s: str):
"""find a string with 1000 o's but no consecutive o's."""
return s.count("o") == 1000 and s.count("oo") == 0A more challenging puzzle that requires dynamic programming is the longest increasing subsequence problem which we can also describe with strings:
from typing import List
def sat(x: List[int], s="Dynamic programming solves this classic job-interview puzzle!!!"):
"""Find the indexes (possibly negative!) of the longest monotonic subsequence"""
return all(s[x[i]] <= s[x[i+1]] and x[i+1] > x[i] for i in range(25))The classic Towers of Hanoi puzzle can be written as follows:
def sat(moves: List[List[int]]):
"""moves is list of [from, to] pairs"""
t = ([8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1], [], []) # towers state
return all(t[j].append(t[i].pop()) or t[j][-1] == min(t[j]) for i, j in moves) and t[0] == t[1]The problems in this repo are based on:
- Wikipedia articles about algorithms, puzzles, and math problems.
- The website codeforces.com, a popular website for programming competition problems
- Olympiad problems from the International Collegiate Programming Contest and International Mathematical Olympiad.
- Numerous trivial puzzles like reversing a list, useful for learning to program
- Classic puzzles like:
- Towers of Hanoi
- Verbal Arithmetic (solve digit-substitutions like SEND + MORE = MONEY)
- The Game of Life (e.g., finding oscillators of a given period, some open)
- Chess puzzles (e.g., knight's tour and n-queen problem variants)
- Two-player games
- Finding optimal strategies for Tic-Tac-Toe, Rock-Paper-Scissors, Mastermind (to add: connect four?)
- Finding minimax strategies for zero-sum bimatrix games, which is equivalent to linear programming
- Finding Nash equilibria of general-sum games (open, PPAD complete)
- Math and programming competitions
- International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) problems
- International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) problems
- Competitive programming problems from codeforces.com
- Graph theory algorithmic puzzles
- Shortest path
- Planted clique (open)
- Elementary algebra
- Solving equations
- Solving quadratic, cubic, and quartic equations
- Number theory algorithmic puzzles:
- Finding common divisors (e.g., using Euclid's algorithm)
- Factoring numbers (easy for small factors, over $100k in prizes have been awarded and open for large numbers)
- Discrete log (again open in general, easy for some)
- Lattices
- Learning parity (typically solved using Gaussian elimination)
- Learning parity with noise (open)
- Compression
- Compress a given string given the decompression algorithm (but not the compression algorithm), or decompress a given compressed string given only the compression algorithm
- (to add: compute huffman tree)
- Hard math problems
- Conway's 99-graph problem (open)
- Finding a cycle in the Collatz process (open)
This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Use your creativity to help teach
AI's to program! To allow for solutions
in multiple languages, the answer to a puzzle has to be a single input that is a basic type
such as str, int, float, bool, or a List or Set (or list of lists, etc.) of them.
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This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact [email protected] with any additional questions or comments.
See the datasheet for our dataset.
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