A little more explanation on the challenges themselves: The challenges (at least: the ones in the 2015 edition) are stories in a Christmas setting. The American

A little more explanation on the challenges themselves: The challenges (at least: the ones in the 2015 edition) are stories in a Christmas setting. The American version of that, so focussing on some question/problem that Santa Claus has: how to distribute packages on a sleigh, how many miles to travel between some cities, how many packages to distribute according to some rule for brave kids, how much paper and ribbon does it take to wrap a set of presents. The programs that you write (if you don't want to solve it by mathematical/brain powers) focus on things like sorting, combinations, counting, grids, trees, graphs, other simple data structures around some fairly basic logic. Nothing too advanced, although sometimes you need to deploy some smart memoization trick (and take the complexity into account, O(log n) is better than O(n!) ) to push the execution time down. You want an answer before Christmas, not before when our Sun expands into a Red Giant. The programs typically are between 5 and 50 lines of code.