Challenges, Puzzles and Courses in Maths, Logic and Computing

December 12, 2015 1:58 PM

I'm looking for challenges, puzzles and "teach yourself" courses that involve maths and logic, probably related to computing. Ideally I'd like a curated source (mailing list or regularly updated website), but perhaps the best we can do is collect them here. Inside I will give examples of what I mean by "challenges, puzzles and courses".

• The Matasano Crypto Challenge - a guided series of crypto problems
• Project Euler - maths problems for computing
• The GCHQ Christmas Puzzle - recruiting people to help the NSA avoid the little oversight it has
• Kaggle - big data challenges

Thinly-veiled recruitment is fine, but I am looking for something more that online education (like Coursera). There should be a puzzle, challenge or competition aspect, and it has to be free to enter.

posted by andrewcooke to Science & Nature (9 answers total)

Rosalind, for learning bioinformatics.

The Rosalind websites website also links to similar projects.
posted by muddgirl at 2:12 PM on December 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

The Little LISPer is a textbook for learning Lisp via questions/puzzles. (Similar: The Little Schemer, The Little Prover)

Martin Gardner wrote a column on mathematical puzzles, and there are books that collect his work.
posted by glass origami robot at 3:01 PM on December 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: i think hack this site probably meets my requirements too (hey, it's my question).
posted by andrewcooke at 3:46 PM on December 12, 2015

IBM Research publishes monthly puzzles. For example, this month's challenge:

"Find a formula to convert the 52 EBCDIC letters into ASCII using no more than 4 operators."
posted by pwnguin at 4:10 PM on December 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also, the top post on HackerNews right now is Stockfighter, which launched today. Apparently it's somewhere between a CTF and a stock market simulation.
posted by pwnguin at 4:22 PM on December 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

HackerRank has a wide range of programming problems in many domains, from introductory ones good for learning a language, to the competitive challenges and contests.
posted by Rangi at 8:06 PM on December 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Advent of Code, Over the Wire and Smash the Stack.
posted by mtarbit at 12:56 PM on December 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

Try Codingame
posted by Joh at 1:25 PM on December 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

This is a little outside of what's your looking for, but consider trying some LSAT practice tests, specifically the logic games.
posted by lukez at 6:43 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]