Computer Science 15-112, Spring 2012
Optional Programming Contest

Contest Rules:

• This is optional and just for fun.  Don't stress!
• Don't violate the spirit of the contest.
• For q1 and q2:
  • No guessing.  You must write a Python program to compute the solution.
  • However, you may do some parts by hand, such as unzipping the provided zip file (or maybe downloading some data).
  • You may use any internet resources, say to figure out how to read from a file.
• For q3 (Risk):
  • Only start q3 once you have successfully completed q1 and q2.
  • Here, you may not use any internet resources except to obtain nice images if you wish.
• How to submit:
  • For q1 and q2, submit an index card or slip of paper with:  Your Team #, The Problem #, Your Solution.  We'll add a timestamp and then tell you if you are right or wrong.  If wrong, you'll incur a 10-minute penalty on your overall time, though you may change your code and resubmit right away.
  • For q3, just have your computer ready to demo your solution at 8:45pm sharp!  No late submissions!!!
• Contest ends at 8:45pm (though we may need a few more minutes to grade q3 at that time, and also to confirm that the winners' q1 and q2 actually do compute the answers they submitted)

Contest Problems:

1.  base56789
What is the value (as a base 10 number which may be greater than 10) of the digit that occurs most frequently when the product of the first 1234 primes is represented in base 56789  (If there is a tie, return the smaller value.) 

2. leastFrequentTvAndMovieWord
You are provided with the file tvAndMovieWords.zip.  This zip file contains a bunch of folders and files, and the files contains words, one per line.  No word occurs twice in any file nor in two separate files.  All of these words are among the five thousand most common words according to this list of words used in TV and movies:
    http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists#TV_and_movie_scripts
Actually, this required two small edits to words with illegal characters.  One was the word "fiancee", but with an accent over the first "e".  We changed that to "fiancee" without the accent.  Also, the word "u" with some other mark over the "u" was replaced with just good-ol' "u" (no mark).
Now, the question: what is the least-common word (according to the rank, which is the first column in word frequency tables given above) among all the words in all the files?

3. Risk-lite
Do not start this problem until you have successfully completed the previous two problems.
You may not use any resources for this problem except the course website and the Wikipedia page on the Risk game.  For this problem, you should write a graphical game of Risk.  The thing is, you don’t have nearly enough time to do so.  So make compromises, lots of them.  But the result has to be at least in some way Risk-like.  Submissions will be ranked against each other on a subjective scale of goodness.  Given the subjectivity, judges’ decisions are final.  If you don't know how to play Risk, read the page quickly.  The rules are pretty simple.

Good luck!!!

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