Programming Challenges

I discovered a new website while I was reading 'The Algorithm Design Manual' from Steve Skiena (I have read only one chapter so far. However, I can say it is worth to read all).

On that website, You can find hundreds of problems that are like the ones used during programming contests. You can submit your solutions in C/C++, Java and Pascal.

This is really interesting opportunity to the developers who haven't got many challenging tasks at work and to who like to solve puzzles. I am some more lucky, my company develops real time billing systems on Unix/Linux.  Therefore, I do much more interesting than reading/writing  database. However, even in my company, the most challenging parts are already developed and they are put to the libraries. Therefore, I don't face challenging problems every day.  I mostly don't do more than calling library functions in order or fixing cheesy bugs. Fortunately there are times that I am asked to develop tough projects.

I  have solved only two of the problems so far. I received 'wrong answer' for one of them due to the '\n' character at the end of the file. The code printing one less '\n' character is accepted.  The results are checked by a software and every byte of the output is important. If you receive 'wrong answer' as a result and you are sure about your solution, you should read the problem text carefully for the output format.