Okie, so it’s simple enough… right?

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.

Lets do this in C… Your first thought might look something like:


for (int i = 1,int y=0;i <= 100;i++)
{
if (i % 3) { printf("Fizz"); y = 1; }
if (i % 5) { printf("Buzz"); y = 1; }
if (y == 0) { printf("%d\n", i); } else { printf("\n"); y = 0; }
}


which is ok, but not entirely efficent… so:


for (int i = 1,int y=0;i <= 100;i++)
{
switch (i %15)
{
case 0: printf ("Fizzbuzz\n"); break;
case 3:
case 6:
case 9:
case 12: printf("Fizz\n"); break;
case 5:
case 10: printf("Buzz\n"); break;
default: printf("%d\n", i); break;
}
}


Or perhaps we’d like to show proper form…


int i,j;
int f = 3;
int b = 5;
int fb = f*b;
char **a = malloc(sizeof(char*)*fb);
//
memset(a, 0, sizeof(char*)*fb);
a[0] = strdup(”Fizzbuzz”);
//
for (i = 1;i < b;i++)
a[i*f] = strdup(”Fizz”);
//
for (i = 1;i < f;i++)
a[i*b] = strdup(”Buzz”);
//
for (i = 1; i <= 100; i++)
{
j = i % fb;
if (a[j]) printf(”%s\n”, a[j]);
else printf(”%d\n”, i);
}

Fun?
(the comments are to try and make wordpresses stupid parser make properly formed xhtml)
Now which of the three are actually the correct answer … well that I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

This is an interesting concept, but one that can be demonstrated fairly simply.

At the moment I’m working on the market interface. Part of the funky of this system is that a lot of the interaction is done via click and drag (trust me, it’s pretty funky). Unfortunately for my sanity the java packaged drag and drop api’s (AWT and Swing flavours) are rather broken, and somewhat over complicated.

Since the simpliest test case I could find (copied from the documentation) totally failed on my dev system, I had a pretty solid limitation. As a result I’ve had to sit down and implement my own drag and drop handling code, and, although I’ve not actually finished it yet, the end product looks to be far better in the long run than the equivalent concoction using java api code, not only is the total code generated much less, but it is far more flexible for my purpose.

That of course leads me to note that if the original attempts had worked, I would probably have cobbled something together from the ancient AWT drag and drop code and spent ages muttering how it never works quite as well as I’d like. I certainly wouldn’t have arrived at this solution nearly as quickly.

Ergo, the more arbitary limitations present on a task, the more creative and original the end product is likely to become.
While it can be argued that this isn’t necessarily a good thing, certainly it can produce some awful results, it has to be better than repeating the same “obvious” performance every time.
This idea extends rather nicely to just about everything we do in life. One of my recent pictures had me wanting to take a picture of a lily without all the clutter in the background. Two pieces of black card later I had the picture I wanted, and it looks much better for it.
When driving any distance the obvious choice is the fastest route (usually along the nearest motorway) … Perhaps the journey might be more interesting if you plan before hand to avoid motorways, or find a place to stop every hour?

Perhaps that’s something to try the next time you have a task that could be somewhat dull or tedious?
Find a more creative solution with random restrictions. Might not make it easier or quicker, but it will certainly be more entertaining