solving problems programming

dewayne sewell

Ive learnt the skill of problem solving is like a muscle, where it is important to keep exercising it to stay strong. It is important to be aware of the soft skills necessary for effective problem solving also, such as communication, critical thinking, team working that can leverage your technical hard skills to find a solution faster/more effective. Two things I will aim to do is; 1. To solve problems on different platforms so I don’t get too comfortable on only one and stagnate. This not only challenges the brain to see things from a new perspective, but to start the habit of continuous learning and skill building. 2. Reach out to others for help / discuss problems and my solutions for feedback and advice and sharing ideas.

Pakize Bozkurt

Problem solving skills is a crucial thing to make easier or better your life. In fact as a human being we do it in every day life. I mean, we have to do it for living. There are many ways to how to do it. The best way is we should ask right questions. First of all, we should ask some questions, such as; \' Are we aware of the problem?, Are we clarify the problem? Do we go into problem rational? Do we have reasons? or Do we have evidences? Do we do check them out? etc. I am from Philosophy teacher background. I like solving problem whatever in my work or daily life. Secondly, we should have more perspectives . Although our brain is lazy, it is always in a starvation for knowledge.For this there are many enjoyable things to do it. I highly recommend to read book every day which kind of you like it and playing game or solving puzzle. I love solving Sudoku, puzzle and reading book or article. Finally, solving problem is our invatiable needed. Having flexibility, critical thinking, communication and teamwork are easy way to improve us to how we can do our work better and good life. Massive thank for this amazing article!

I read this amazing article. Normally, everyone knows that but we dont use most of time this informations. Which one is the best way to use? Really it does not matter, every one is like a gold opinion. We can use this ideas for the daily life. I have already used that learn from past solution and ask to someone who knows very well. This is so helpful for me. Sometimes google is the best option for ask to someone. Google can be the best teacher for us as well. Soft skills like a team work or solving problem and critical thinking can be important than typing code. We can learn typing code but we can not learn critical thinking and solving problems from google very well. Thank you for this article.

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Thanks for this !

Fahil kiima

Thanks a lot for the ideas on problem solving,I really had a problem with that and now going to use what you\'ve informed us about to better my problem solving skills. Thanks.

Alan Codinho

Nice overview

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Before Semicolon

Mar 18, 2021

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How to Solve any Programming Problem

A simple guide on how to think like a programmer.

As humans, we solve problems all the time and as developers, it is no different. Problem-solving-focused courses are not very popular or common and a lot of developers tend to focus on learning tools, languages, and frameworks rather than learning how to think like a problem solver, or a programmer.

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Elson Correia

I am a UI Engineer who loves building products and sharing ideas. I write about product and web development, career insights and programming in general. 😊

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Towards Data Science

Apr 12, 2022

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Hands-on Tutorial: How To Improve Your Problem-Solving Skills As A Programmer

The technical part is the easiest.

Programming is ultimately problem-solving. We only apply the programming language to express how we’ve thought about a problem and the approach we’re using to solve it.

The worst thing you could do is to start chipping away at the problem once it’s presented. This is where most newbie programmers get stuck and give up. Think back to school days when you had to do written assessments. Usually, the paper [or invigilator] would tell you how much time you have for planning and how much should be set aside for writing. It’s the same thing with programming.

Every problem is a coat for a series of smaller problems that have to be tackled. The technical part is always the easiest once you’ve clearly devised a clear plan of attack for how to solve the problem.

“ If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my axe. ” — Abraham Lincoln.

To demonstrate this we’re going to work through a coding problem together. Coding problems are a good way to develop your ability to think through programs. The more exposure you get to different types of problems will significantly improve your ability to problem-solve. Thus, it’s important you’re constantly putting yourself in situations to tackle new problems — even if it’s just for 15–30 minutes a day.

Problem statement: The Alphabet Rangoli

Note : This challenge was taken from HackerRank .

You are given an integer, N. Your task is to print an alphabet rangoli of size N. (Rangoli is a form of Indian folk art based on the creation of patterns.)

Different sizes of alphabet rangoli are shown below:

The center of the rangoli has the first alphabet letter a, and the boundary has the alphabet letter (in alphabetical order).

The input to the function is a single line containing size , which is the size of the rangoli. Your function should return a string made up of each of the lines of the rangoli separated by a newline character (\n).

#Step 1 — Take time to understand the problem

The first step to solving any problem is to understand the problem being solved. This means you’re able to articulate the problem fully in your own words.

Don’t get disheartened if you can’t, it’s part of the process of understanding. When you come across something you can’t articulate clearly then it means there's a gap in your understanding. If you want to be able to solve the problem then you need to fill the gap.

This means you must ask questions.

When working on a problem alone then you have to ask yourself more questions to flesh out what exactly it is you don’t understand — you could also use Google to get a better idea of what exactly it is you’re not understanding about the specific part. If you’re working with a team or consulting someone then this is your chance to ask them questions to fill the voids in your understanding.

The main gist is that you’ve got to take your time to fully understand the problem you have. Doing this will benefit you in the long run and significantly simplify the problem-solving process.

Application:

Given our alphabet rangoli problem, the first thing we’ve got to do is understand what the problem we’re trying to solve is. Here’s how I’ve articulated it in my own words.

Given an input to dictate the size, we are to create a function that returns an alphabet rangoli which is an art form from Indian folk that is based on the creation of patterns.

Notice that I clearly described what we expect to go into the function and what is expected to come out. This is because, at a high level, I like to think of problem-solving as taking a certain input and transforming it into a certain output. At the moment, the mapping function is a black box but our next step is to deconstruct what’s going on in the black box.

Another thing I like to do at this step is to draw my own examples with some custom inputs to better understand what would happen. For example, we know this is an alphabet rangoli and the alphabet is only 26 letters, but what would happen if a size greater than 26 was passed? Fortunately, this question was answered for us in the brief but if it wasn’t we’d have to figure out what could happen by asking questions.

Note : remember Python is slicing doesn’t take into account the end number so passing 27 would take the first 26 letters.

Here is an example of my drawing:

I’d draw a few of these to better reinforce my understanding.

#Step 2 — Break the problem down

Every problem is made up of a number of small problems. Breaking a larger problem down into smaller problems to be solved makes the greater less daunting to be approached.

All that needs to be done when the smaller problems are solved is that they need to be joined together. This would result in the solution of the greater problem if you carefully think through the inputs and output at each step.

In essence, what I’m saying is that you should solve the problem on paper or whiteboard before you attempt to solve it with code. Be sure to write out the steps in detail and clearly understand what’s happening.

I solved the rangoli problem on paper first by working through the facts of what I’ve designed in the example above. When I had clarity about the facts, I organized them into steps as follows:

Now that I’ve got the facts I can design the steps.

I’ve broken down the problem into 7 smaller problems without using any technical terms. The next step is to figure out how you would technically implement each step.

This means it’s possible to still go deeper into solving this problem because I haven’t gone into much detail. For example, I’ve just written ‘ draw the middle line. ’ How am I going to draw the middle line? I didn’t go this much deeper into this solution since I’ve solved problems like this before so I have a clear idea of how to draw the middle line (i.e. to draw the middle line you have to join the reverse of the first n letters to the first n letters (not including a) by a “-” symbol.

If you’re unsure how to do certain steps when you’ve written it out like this then don’t be afraid of taking extra time to further break down how each step will be implemented with pseudocode.

#Step 3 — Execution

Now you’ve solved the problem on paper. All you have to do is implement the same solution you’ve written on paper but translate it into code.

This is where your knowledge of your programming language comes into play. Depending on your environment, you can Google ways to do certain things for example, how to reverse a string or how to take the first n letters of a string.

Since you’ve already got a structure for how to solve the problem, you don’t have to work through the problem from steps 1–7. Start with the easiest steps to get some quick wins under your belt.

When you’ve got your wins then come back to the parts of the problem you find more challenging. Once you’ve solved all of these problems then put it together and you’ve got your solution.

Here’s how I solved smaller parts of the problem:

To do step 5 I broke it down into a smaller problem. I created a program and used my name to get the left side and right side.

Now all I have to do is join the values together by “-” and center the middle value (n-i). Ensure the line is the same length as the middle line with the other values made up with “-”.

The next step is to translate this solution into the code for our problem:

Step 7 is to put it all together which means passing a value to it. Let’s pass a size of 4 to our function to see if it matches the pattern we drew above.

problem solved.

#Step 4 — Reflect

There are several ways to solve a problem; Nothing says my current solution to the problem is the best way to solve it. This means now is a good time to reflect on how we went about solving the problem and think about ways you could make your solution more efficient.

One thing I realized immediately is that I didn’t have to write out the whole alphabet manually. I could have simply imported the string module and called ascii_lowercase .

I’d usually spend this time looking at other people's solutions to see how they achieved the same thing.

Programming requires you to think. Part of the thinking process is decomposing problems into smaller modules to make them easier to solve. The four steps to solving a problem are:

• Understand the problem
• Break down the problem

Thanks for reading.

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Problem Solving

Solving problems is the core of computer science. Programmers must first understand how a human solves a problem, then understand how to translate this "algorithm" into something a computer can do, and finally how to "write" the specific syntax (required by a computer) to get the job done. It is sometimes the case that a machine will solve a problem in a completely different way than a human.

Computer Programmers are problem solvers. In order to solve a problem on a computer you must:

Know how to represent the information (data) describing the problem.

Determine the steps to transform the information from one representation into another.

Information Representation

A computer, at heart, is really dumb. It can only really know about a few things... numbers, characters, booleans, and lists (called arrays) of these items. (See Data Types). Everything else must be "approximated" by combinations of these data types.

A good programmer will "encode" all the "facts" necessary to represent a problem in variables (See Variables). Further, there are "good ways" and "bad ways" to encode information. Good ways allow the computer to easily "compute" new information.

An algorithm (see Algorithm) is a set of specific steps to solve a problem. Think of it this way: if you were to tell your 3 year old neice to play your favorite song on the piano (assuming the neice has never played a piano), you would have to tell her where the piano was, and how to sit on the bench, and how to open the cover, and which keys to press, and which order to press them in, etc, etc, etc.

The core of what good programmers do is being able to define the steps necessary to accomplish a goal. Unfortunately, a computer, only knows a very restricted and limited set of possible steps. For example a computer can add two numbers. But if you want to find the average of two numbers, this is beyond the basic capabilities of a computer. To find the average, you must:

• First: Add the two numbers and save this result in a variable
• Then: Divide this new number the number two, and save this result in a variable.
• Finally: provide this number to the rest of the program (or print it for the user).

We "compute" all the time. Computing is the act of solving problems (or coming up with a plan to solve problems) in an organized manner. We don't need computers to "compute". We can use our own brain.

Encapsulation and Abstraction and Complexity Hiding

Computer scientists like to use the fancy word "Encapsulation" to show how smart we are. This is just a term for things we do as humans every day. It is combined with another fancy term: "Abstraction".

Abstraction is the idea of "ignoring the details". For example, a forest is really a vastly complex ecosystem containing trees, animals, water paths, etc, etc, etc. But to a computer scientist (and to a normal person), its just "a forest".

For example, if your professor needs a cup of coffee, and asks you the single item: "Get me a cup of coffee", he has used both encapsulation and abstraction. The number of steps required to actually get the coffee are enumerable. Including, getting up, walking down the hall, getting in your car, driving to a coffee stand, paying for the coffee, etc, etc, etc. Further, the idea of what a cup of coffee is, is abstract. Do you bring a mug of coffee, or a Styrofoam cup? Is it caffeinated or not? Is it freshly brewed or from concentrate? Does it come from Africa or America?

All of this information is TOO MUCH and we would quickly be unable to funciton if we had to remember all of these details. Thus we "abstract away" the details and only remember the few important items.

This brings us to the idea of "Complexity Hiding". Complexity hiding is the idea that most of the times details don't matter. In a computer program, as simple an idea as drawing a square on the screen involves hundreds (if not thousands) of (low level) computer instructions. Again, a person couldn't possible create interesting programs if every time they wanted to do something, they had to re-write (correctly) every one of those instructions. By "ecapsulating" what is meant by "draw square" and "reusing" this operation over and over again, we make programming tractable.

Encapsulation

The idea behind encapsulation is to store the information necessary to a particular idea in a set of variables associated with a single "object". We then create functions to manipulate this object, regardless of what the actual data is. From that point on, we treat the idea from a "high level" rather than worry about all the parts (data) and actions (functions) necessary to represent the object in a computer.

Brute Force

Brute force is a technique for solving problems that relies on a computers speed (how fast it can repeat steps) to solve a problem. For example, if you wanted to know how many times the number 8 goes into the number 100, you could do the following:

Of course this is a silly way for a computer (or a human) to solve this problem. The real way we would do it is:

When in doubt, you can often use "brute force" to solve a problem, but it often saves time (at least computer time) to think about the problem and solve it in an elegant manner.