Hello World! One plus Two equals Three

Hello world! One plus two equals three. As I mentioned in a previous article, I’ve been building chatbots through an internship with Tangible AI. Today I was given an interesting challenge to manually solve at least two of the puzzles mentioned in this article.

My first question, though, is what puzzles? I couldn’t find any based on this article alone, so; I had to delve a little to find the paper on programming puzzles. Once I completed that task, I had to find the puzzles. Which are available in a repo on GitHub.

Sweet! Now that paper tells me anything, it’s that computers are remarkably dumb. I mean, the first puzzle that’s mentioned in the article is to find a string that’s contains a thousand o’s without two o’s together. How on earth am I going to solve that one?

Another thing to remember, though, is as dumb as computers might be, humans are about equally as lazy. What I mean by that is, when you laugh at a computer for not being able to solve problem, you must ask yourself; why did someone build the application for that?

It’s because we don’t want to do it ourselves.

As I think on this concept, I must say, that I am human. So, I scrolled down to the tutorial section to resolve the hello world and summation questions in under five minutes.

Now, how many o’s are in this blog? Uh-oh, not enough and my first run-through contained a double o.

I edited it and added some more characters. The complication, however; is how does one achieve a thousand o’s in an blog post? Without an inclusion of those – pesky little double-o-words?

I reckon, as a writer, I’d have to bust out a thesaurus. Meanwhile, we’ve given the pc a handicap – it just has to put a bunch of characters together and avoid that one parameter. At this point in my article, I’ll have you all know, that I’m at 124 o’s.

I’ve transitioned my draft to a Microsoft Word document and have decided to work without any additional paragraphing so that I can easily paste this string into the o counter.

I reckon if I wanted to be a little lazier, I’d find a quicker way to count the number of characters in my article. For example, I could work with Microsoft Word, hit CTRL F and type ‘find o.’

Oh. So, I’ve decided that I can actually work with paragraphs again and abandon the Python code that I was using to ascertain whether or not achieved my goal.  

I’d make use of my browser; however, the famous/most popular search engine is mentioned in my Yoast viewer and that count skewed the results.

The Tutorial

How did I come to the conclusion that typing out Hello World! One Plus Two Equals Three is a sufficient response to the man vs. machine challenge I was given?

Tutorial1 and Tutorial3 on GitHub offered these two puzzles or challenges for folks and although I would love to write a thousand o’s – I have to admit that I’ve run out of gusto at 196. I guess that is something I should get my computer to do for me because I’m not Bart Simpson.

Goodie! Would you look at that? I’ve successfully found me a string with a thousand o’s and not two adjacent o’s.