Facebook Hacker Cup 2012 – How to solve Alphabet Soup

Alphabet Soup was by far the easiest problem in the qualifiers. I am not talking implementation but about understanding the problem. In some cases the “problem designers” did a good job in confusing me for at least an hour by their style in description. In alphabet soup’s case the problem was formulated as follows:

Alfredo Spaghetti really likes soup, especially when it contains alphabet pasta. Every day he constructs a sentence from letters, places the letters into a bowl of broth and enjoys delicious alphabet soup.

Today, after constructing the sentence, Alfredo remembered that the Facebook Hacker Cup starts today! Thus, he decided to construct the phrase “HACKERCUP”. As he already added the letters to the broth, he is stuck with the letters he originally selected. Help Alfredo determine how many times he can place the word “HACKERCUP” side-by-side using the letters in his soup.

Input

The first line of the input file contains a single integer T: the number of test cases. T lines follow, each representing a single test case with a sequence of upper-case letters and spaces: the original sentence Alfredo constructed.

Output

Output T lines, one for each test case. For each case, output “Case #t: n”, where t is the test case number (starting from 1) and n is the number of times the word “HACKERCUP” can be placed side-by-side using the letters from the sentence.

Constraints

  • 1 < T ≤ 20
  • Sentences contain only the upper-case letters A-Z and the space character
  • Each sentence contains at least one letter, and contains at most 1000 characters, including spaces

To solve it, simply iterate through the characters in the string, counting how frequently each of them occurs.

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Hacking Contest by Google, Code Jam 2012

Get seated, ready, steady.. GO. There is another annual hacking cup coming. I already pointed to the Facebook Hacker Cup a few days ago. Now it is time to announce that also Google is doing it’s annual contest in 2012.

Google Code Jam 2012

The first round starts in March 2012, so maybe you already want to lock the door for practicing.

Last year over 30,000 coders competed, be the 30,001 hacker that gets the almighty title of Code Jam Champion, and a hefty $10,000 reward.

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Facebook Hacker Cup 2012 – starts in 2 weeks

Hackers around the world, here are some good news

Facebook is starting its second (now annual) Facebook Hacker Cup. Get your coke, beer or even glas of redwine next to you, arrange some brain-food and get in a relaxed postion. There will be some code to be written in the next weeks. That’s a challenge all AI-Class Students shall be interested in.

If you are willing to submit your solutions to different hacking problems, you may qualify for the first of three online rounds. The competition commences with a 72-hour Qualification Round on January 20, 2012 at 4:00 PM PT and ends on January 23, 2012 at 4:00 PM PT. You will be presented with three problems and if you correctly solves at least one problem, you will advance to Online Round 1. All online Rounds will be occuring in January 2012 with world finals held at Facebook’s headquarters in California, registration started January 4, 2012.

Facebook will pay to fly and accommodate the top 25 hackers from the third online round out to their californian campus and there is more to win:

$5,000 USD and title as world champion to the top hacker
$2,000 for second place
$1,000 for third
$100 for fourth through 25th
Awesome t-shirts for the top 100 hackers coming out of the second online round

Details:
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[Infographic] Understanding VIRAL content marketing

“Going viral”.. one of the most important term in marketing nowadays. Designers, Bloggers, Marketers and Entertainment producers are working hard to create viral content. Unfortunately, there is no death proof recipe for going viral. Voltierdigital.com now  compile it’s research results into an awesome infographic called Understanding Viral Content Marketing.

Even if you can’t guarantee virality, understanding the key components of what makes content go viral can help you ensure that your great content gets “the attention it deserves.”

Viral content relies on two things.  The content itself is worthy of being shared the content and is shared widely enough to reap the benefits of the networks they are shared on.  If your content is not worthy of being shared then it won’t go viral.

Check out the fantastic infographic below to learn more about what it takes to go viral.

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Top 50 “Best Places to Work” in Tech industry

Glassdoor, a career community to anonymously rate your company and CEOs,  released its annual Employees’ Choice Awards, listing the top 50 “Best Places to Work,” based on surveys collected from U.S. employees in 2011.

Google, Facebook and Rackspace are the best places to work in 2012 according to the survey. “More than 250,000 employees sounded off on what it’s like to work at more than 65,000 companies during the past year and shared the good, the bad and everything in between.” says the report.

An exerpt: “Smartest and most passionate people I have ever worked with. Company means so much to so many – humbled to be an employee here.” – Facebook Staffing (New York, NY)

Congratulations to all the 2012 Best Places to Work award winners!

What would have Facebook, Youtube and Google+ looked like back in 1997

1997, three brand new websites started their service. Check out the latest technologies used to form a new web. Forget about fireball and yahoo.. just get in touch and stay in-touch with your friends with google plus, facebook and youtube. Make sure that you have all your landline capabilities ready.. you will need 8kb/s data rate..

 

Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.03 and a screen resolution of 1024×768 pixels, running under Windows 95. We recommend using a Virtual Machine or appropriate hardware, connected to a CRT monitor. If such an environment unachievable, it should be possible to experience the piece with any browser that still supports HTML Frames. The transfer speed of our server is limited to 8 kB/s («dial-up» speed).

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[Infographic] The good old Internet back in ’96

We absolutely are in web2.0 now. But who of you guys remembers the good old times back in 1996? Just to reflect some of the problems back in th late 90. I remember fighting with image preloaders to optimize my pages for user experience by prefetching every thing for mouse over effects..

Look at this infographic from onlineuniversity.net

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