Why puzzles in programming?

jd12345

I have been solving some programming questions and all are some sort of puzzles?
What are they trying to teach us with puzzles? What skills are they trying to develop by solving puzzles?

Borek

Logical thinking.

jd12345

What logical thinking is required in software development and other stuff?

NemoReally

The puzzles aim to let you develop your ability to analyze a problem and develop one or effective strategies for solving them and translating those strategies into algorithms and then implement those algorithms in code. Programming puzzles may target particular data structures or programming methods (eg, matrix algebra or optimization)

AlephZero

When you see some of the code written by "professionals", you might think the answer as "none whatever" ....

But seriously, the puzzles may also be testing that you REALLY understand what the programming language means, as well as your "logical thinking" skills.

For example
Is a perfectly legal C function, but it probably doesn't do what its author intended, for at least three reasons.

cofrecearinaf

A possible advantage is that the answer doesn't always lie an internet search away. If you want to make your students think to eventually get the programming mindset needed, you can easily make up an original question that must be thought out instead of copied from some programming forum.

The same can't be done with practical questions because by definition practical questions are common and therefore answers to such questions can easily be found online.

Finally, be thankful. In practice, everyday programming is often tedious and boring whereas puzzles are fun.

Adyssa

Puzzles are a good way to make sure that not only do you find a correct solution, but you find a solution that is computable in a reasonable amount of time. Often with puzzles of any significant size, there are solutions that might as well be incorrect because they are so horribly inefficient. The (time / space) complexity of a solution is an important thing to know.

I play around at Project Euler a lot :)

jd12345

Sorry for the late reply
ok so puzzles improve my logical thinking. But logical thinking is required in every field of science and maths. Why computer science course focuses so much on logic building?

Mark44

Because when you write a program, you are writing a sequence of statements in a certain order to anticipate all possible values that a program user might enter. Unless you are writing a very trivial program, your program needs to do one thing if the user enters a certain value, but do something else if the user enters a different value, and so on. Also, the program needs to be able to react in some graceful way if the user enters invalid data.

Writing a program that deals with these occurrences requires a lot of logical thinking on the part of the programmer.

mfb

And as a consequence, most science and math problems are puzzles as well.

jd12345

True. Didnt really think about it. Anyways thank you