When not exploring around Brazil, I’ve been working on lots of my own projects, and doing a lot more messing around with Ruby and Python. I stumbled upon Facebook’s Puzzle Page the other day, which they presumably use to attract nerds to job openings. Anyway, the Mike Korn puzzle caught my eye. I really enjoyed Abstract Algebra and Number Theory back in college, and had to dust off that part of my brain to recall how number partitions work. Of course, I was talking online to my good friend Dan about it. (Sorry Buster, you weren’t around)

Anyway, it seems dumb to completely re-hash the great math and code explanation offered over at 20bits. And I was doubly doh’d to see that he even put in the case statement solution that I thought I was being clever using.

For anyone curious, here is some Ruby code to run through the simulation for entered text, just for fun.

entered_name = "mikekorn"     #lowercase and without spaces

alphabet = ("a".."z").to_a
mappings = alphabet.sort_by{rand}
keys_fucked_mapping = Hash[*alphabet.zip(mappings).flatten]

puts "Key Mappings:"
puts "-------------"
p keys_fucked_mapping
puts "------------------------------------------"

def fucked_typing(name_a,keys_fucked_mapping)
  fucked_output = String.new
  name_a.each do |letter|
    fucked_output +=  keys_fucked_mapping[letter]
  end
  fucked_output
end

count = 0
what_to_mash = entered_name
begin
  what_to_mash = what_to_mash.split(//)
  what_to_mash = fucked_typing(what_to_mash,keys_fucked_mapping)
  puts what_to_mash
  count += 1
end while entered_name.to_s != what_to_mash.to_s
puts "Number of Iterations: #{count}"

If you have a puzzle you’d like me to solve for your job, please feel free to contact me at bazoomercom at gmail.
And ideally you are located in downtown Columbus, Ohio.

Update: no, I don’t want a job with facebook.

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