It would be more useful to describe what abilities one would have at a particular level, than the amount of grinding it takes to achieve it. Being able to solve Euler problems at all might be a useful indicator of being a certain level, but having done a lot of them doesn’t seem directly important, and if it teaches certain skills, then we should look at those skills directly.
I’d rather take shortcuts to levels of ability rather than grind through them, if shortcuts are available. XP is only useful when there’s only one way to get to a higher level. I’m pretty sure that’s not true in real life.
Agree with the general point about grinding, but Project Euler is the best way that I know of to look at the relevant skills directly. I’ll be happy to use something else if it works well enough.
I am not very familiar with Project Euler, so to get an idea of what you are talking about: what skills are you looking at with 50 problems that you can’t look at with 5?
Ah, the increasing difficulty level makes a difference. Though for purpose of proving skills, it seems you could just skip to the harder ones, even though that may not work well for training.
They are not monotonically harder, and they are not all the same exact skill being tested. So someone who has completed Project Euler problems 1-30 has done more to demonstrate her ability than someone who has only done Project Euler problem 30.
If your level is such that 30 represents your current challenge, then doing 1-29 won’t take toooooo much time anyway. And you can still have fun trying to improve on the best solution offered so far for the problem—there are multiple ways to solve a given Project Euler problem.
It would be more useful to describe what abilities one would have at a particular level, than the amount of grinding it takes to achieve it. Being able to solve Euler problems at all might be a useful indicator of being a certain level, but having done a lot of them doesn’t seem directly important, and if it teaches certain skills, then we should look at those skills directly.
I entirely agree with this.
I’d rather take shortcuts to levels of ability rather than grind through them, if shortcuts are available. XP is only useful when there’s only one way to get to a higher level. I’m pretty sure that’s not true in real life.
Agree with the general point about grinding, but Project Euler is the best way that I know of to look at the relevant skills directly. I’ll be happy to use something else if it works well enough.
I am not very familiar with Project Euler, so to get an idea of what you are talking about: what skills are you looking at with 50 problems that you can’t look at with 5?
The problems have rising difficulty level. You need much more understanding to solve a problem like this than to solve this one.
(Ooh, I like that first problem. It reframes in all sorts of interesting directions.)
Ah, the increasing difficulty level makes a difference. Though for purpose of proving skills, it seems you could just skip to the harder ones, even though that may not work well for training.
They are not monotonically harder, and they are not all the same exact skill being tested. So someone who has completed Project Euler problems 1-30 has done more to demonstrate her ability than someone who has only done Project Euler problem 30.
If your level is such that 30 represents your current challenge, then doing 1-29 won’t take toooooo much time anyway. And you can still have fun trying to improve on the best solution offered so far for the problem—there are multiple ways to solve a given Project Euler problem.