This was my favourite dand sci problem so far, and I would have spent longer looking at it if it hadn’t coincided with a period when I had less free time than usual.
The one niggle I had with this is that the data wasn’t in the most user friendly format, and a significant fraction of the time I spent on this was used munging the data into a more useable format. Maybe a useful exercise for problems of this complexity would be for the author to attempt to solve it using just the given data, and adjust it accordingly?
Making every problem this complex feels like it would be taking things too far, but I would like the occasional one like it.
This was my favourite dand sci problem so far, and I would have spent longer looking at it if it hadn’t coincided with a period when I had less free time than usual.
The one niggle I had with this is that the data wasn’t in the most user friendly format, and a significant fraction of the time I spent on this was used munging the data into a more useable format. Maybe a useful exercise for problems of this complexity would be for the author to attempt to solve it using just the given data, and adjust it accordingly?
Making every problem this complex feels like it would be taking things too far, but I would like the occasional one like it.