A little puzzle for CppCon

As CppCon begins, Stevens Capital Management is running an SCM Challenge quiz with questions provided by some CppCon speakers.(Creating a little login is required, in part so you can save progress, but they promise not to spam you.)

I’ve contributed a simple little question that’s directly related to my CppCon closing plenary session on Friday. By “simple little” I mean that my question itself is simple and can be illustrated well in a handful of short lines of code. Solving it with a valid answer is another matter, however. I wonder how many people will be able to give reasonable solutions[*] that pass the three short test cases…

Take a look, think about the question, and see if you can come up with a solution that works. Feel free to use the comments below to collaborate with others to solve the puzzle; if you’re at CppCon, use the great face time with other attendees to share possible solutions. If you succeed in writing a solution that prints “true” three times, they’ll email it to me and I’ll review it.

In my talk on Friday, I’ll present solutions to this and other lifetime problems. For those who aren’t here at CppCon in person, you’ll be able to catch the talk online on YouTube about a week later. (As always, all CppCon talks are being recorded and will be posted, but it will take a month or so to process and post all of the sessions — it takes a while to do professional-grade production for over 100 talks! Processing the plenary session videos is being expedited so that we can get those ones up quickly.)

I hope you enjoy the puzzle!

 

[*] No fair hardcoding a hack that artificially prints the right results for just these three cases. I know how to do that too, but that’s evading the problem, not solving it. :)

 

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