I must personally say thank you for starting those puzzles. Over the years I have implemented many of them as fun weekend projects, but one puzzle in particula

I must personally say thank you for starting those puzzles. Over the years I have implemented many of them as fun weekend projects, but one puzzle in particular stuck with me: Sling Blade Runner. On and off the last ~four years I have worked on the sling blade runner puzzle creating dozens of different approaches for the problem. From genetic algorithms, visualizers, various traveling salesmen "solutions", stuffing the graph in the cpu cache and letting it run for a month to document how far the dumb solution wouldn't get, custom algorithms doing wacky things such as spherical gravity water flow simulations and many more I have pushed that data set through a lot of things. When I read books and papers and constantly working on the SBR problem in the back of my head. Generic graph theory can be a boring topic, but for some reason with this problem and data set to play with it has been something that has stuck with me. The generic problem of solving the longest path in a directed circular graph is NP so program solutions are all about find something good enough given limited time or exploiting issues with the data set to actually solve it. There is a lot of payoff in the industry for good enough solutions to this problem (which I am not actually involved in, I hack on webkit during the day). It is the puzzle the keeps on giving and as I encounter new techniques on the job or in reading I often end up trying later in the evening to see how well/fast they apply to this problem. I moved to Boston with an existing job (same one I am at now) so I never really got to go through the whole interview process at ITA, but always thought it would be fun to help design those puzzles. So again thanks for the puzzles, especially Sling Blade Runner!