Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Phase 1: Dreaming of code

It's now twenty days since I last wrote code.

Aside from losing my mind, one of the reasons I left my last job was I lost my love for coding; getting home burnt out and frustrated doesn't exactly inspire one to take on personal projects, and I like having personal projects!

So I decided that I should enforce a no-code period, during which I can establish whether I:
  1. Still love code, and it is exactly what I want to do forever.
  2. Need to change.

As of this morning option 1 seems considerably more favourable, I woke up dreaming about code, hazaa. To be honest I never really had any doubt ;)
Now I'm going to continue resisting the urge to code until it becomes unbearable, perhaps then in the future I will appreciate being able to do it professionally again. An encouraging start though.

Non-geeks, or those wishing to live a drab uninspiring life (you're both the same to me!) may wish to stop here...

Okay, so I was thinking about a problem which came up a while ago, I believe while I was talking to my friend Pete, and it is this:
Suppose I drop you at a random station on the London Underground. Because I am kind I have given you a stopwatch, a pen and a note book, but because I am malicious I have removed from the underground all maps, and all signs which tell you what line you are currently on.
When navigating the underground you know your current station name and how long it takes to get from one station to another; if you decide to change lines at a station you can do so, but all you know is that you have changed to another, randomly selected line.

Your task is to deliver me a map of the underground (and for bonus points: in the shortest possible time).

There may be no (clever) solution within the constraints I have given, so please don't waste your lives doing it. Discuss.

1 comments:

  1. Great idea Dave, I'm hoping to do something similar when I'm off next month. Going to spend 2 weeks thinking and resting, in the hope that I'll be fresh and full of ideas after.

    That underground map would be fantastic to see, espeically overlaid over one of the "Real" (http://www.flickr.com/photos/amphalon/650828303/sizes/o/in/photostream/) maps - would be interesting to see where the slow parts are. Could work out the average speed of the trains and all sorts of fun things.

    Take care Dave

    ReplyDelete