Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems, their difficulty varies from one problem to another and theoretically, they can be solved by anyone. A good mathematical knowledge is required to solve most of them, and good programming skills will make your life easier.
You may however, use the inductive chain learning approach, where solving the first problems will help you solve the next ones and so on by learning new methods and concepts, both in mathematics and in programming.
Project Euler problems follow the “one-minute rule”, they are designed to be solved in less than one minute, however it is not always easy to accomplish this rule. I did a program to solve one of PE problems once and it took it all night to get the answer, it worked, however with a little more analysis I learnt how to recode the solution that solves the same problem in a few seconds.
The first problem for instance is very easy :
Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.
But the difficulty raises, for instance the problem 125 is not as easy to solve as the first one:
There are exactly eleven palindromes below one-thousand that can be written as consecutive square sums, and the sum of these palindromes is 4164. Note that 1 = 02 + 12 has not been included as this problem is concerned with the squares of positive integers.
Find the sum of all the numbers less than 108 that are both palindromic and can be written as the sum of consecutive squares.
Whenever you feel stuck with one of the problems, you can look for help here. It is not however, a forum to give out nor to ask for answers.
There is a raking system that has 6 levels, when solving a certain amount of problem you improve your level. There is another ranking system called “eulerians”, where the best current performers based on the 25 most recent problems appear. You can also see the level of other people order by nationality or by computer languages.
Just a Note: Dont' ask me the answers of these or others problems.
If you like solving mathematical and computer problems or you want to know more about this project, give it a try.
Edit 18/12/2011. My score :
