What I generally don't like in these kind of puzzles is that the task itself is given with some specific method or algorithm in mind (but you're not being told)

What I generally don't like in these kind of puzzles is that the task itself is given with some specific method or algorithm in mind (but you're not being told). i.e. to efficiently solve some particular task you have to use K-D tree; Some specific graph algorithm for another task; Another specific DP method and so on... I find this quite boring.