"I have no idea what two kids with hyphenated names would do when they get married. "

Easy ... git pull origin ...
git checkout -b kids --track origin/kids
git rebase master ...

Heh - ok - good response. ;)

I'm intrigued, but I'll have to try it tonight or over the weekend.

I normally do an End of Day deadline, but for this one, let's say Monday.

My solution was pretty straightforward. I created simple methods for creating people, getting married and procreating and then dumped everything out in bulleted lists. This did indeed run long enough twice to kill my local CF server, but can also just return a couple of families - call it bad genetics. I'm sure there are 1000 solutions, and probably simpler ones than mine, but it was quick and fun!

http://pastebin.com/mn4MUFVq

Line 56 is epic:

// Procreation boiled down to script; maybe my wife is right ...

Here's my screenshot ... I couldn't think of a better way to post the image, sorry.

One more try on the image ... http://twitpic.com/6pesau

I made my version a little gamified. Since Family Trees and fortunes all depend on the economic conditions, I made my application able to vary the size of the family depending on some conditions. Depending on a bit of chance and a bit of fortune, a family member (if attractive enough) will get married and possibly (if fertile enough) have children.

When you run my application, choose some conditions and it'll spit out what happened based on the genetics and economic conditions.

Code: http://pastebin.com/Tr65NbT5
Live Application: http://nodans.com/familytre...

Lemme know if you need anything else,

Dan Wilson

I made an OO version.

That's fascinating. Have you considered making the simulation randomly change the economic situation?

Did you prefix your struct keys with numbers just to force a proper sort order?

I prefixed the structure keys with numbers purely for sorting.

Otherwise, some stuff was under the kids and it looked wack.

DW

Here's my solution...
http://pastebin.com/L4tiWBzM

For each descendant, there is a chance they will get married. If they get married, they try for kids. Occasionally, the mother decides that she wants the kids to have hyphenated names. Once the family tree is generated, I just output them as lists.

I do confess that this took a little longer than 5 minutes :)

Here's my attempt:
https://github.com/mikehodg...

The code could be cleaned up a bit, but it works alright. I don't track which names are used, so sometimes you will have families where two children have the same name. It puts a limit of 5 children per family and the chance of getting married is 50/50.

Probably not as good as everyone elses, but I tried. Alose, i'm very bummed the syntax highlighting on pastebin doesn't recognize cfscript

http://pastebin.com/WXTvX98A

Ok - anyone who posts AFTER this comment, is not going to be considered for the prize. But I highly encourage folks to share anyway. (In fact, I may actually code this myself as well.) Going to do my review either today or tomorrow and post the winner here.

I'm going to do some reviews via comments. This is meant to be off the cuff, blunt, etc. When I point out mistakes, know that I make them too, and that I'm certainly far from always correct, so push back, disagree, etc.

Working on Joshua Miller's first.

1) Would be cool if your logic to display "The Foos" handled last names that ended with S.

2) Nice names. :)

3) nit picky - listToArray, the comma is implied. I'd just have written: function gender() { return ["m","f"]; }

4) function person(i,g,f,t)
I normally prefer to use argument names that are a bit more descriptive. It's more typing, but makes it easier to understand the logic.

5) Interesting syntax here:
p.gender = gender()[randrange(1,2)];

I don't think I've seen that in CF before.

6) Love some of your comments.

That's it - good entry with some interesting syntax choices.

Dan's entry:

1) -10000 points for a tag based CFC. ;)
2) +10000 points for the use of economic conditions. Lookin gat your logic now and I love how you did it.
3) Bit confused by the code that makes a duplicate of getConfig(). You don't seem to use it - like in definePatriachNode.
4) Any reason why person.cfc just didn't use automatic accessors?

I quickly wrote my example on a CF8 machine so no script based CFCs nor Automatic Accessors were available.

The duplicate() call is reflexive behavior for me, since structs are passed by reference and changing struct contents would ripple through the application (possibly causing side effects). Looking at my code, it looks like I never actually cause a change to the config struct so it's not needed.

The economic conditions thing was fun to do. I'm a bit into gamification these days and it's fun to goof around and gamify things a bit. One day I'll show you what we are doing with ChallengeWave...

Thanks for the puzzler Ray. That was the most fun I've had programming in a while.

DW

Tyson's entry:
1) Doesn't your init function need to return this?

2) Nit picky - I'd write isMarried as one line: return isObject(variables.spouse);

3) addAnotherMouthToFeed - I think that the functions you guys are using have had some epic names .Thanks. :) Heh - "Spouse Factory"

4) Would have given you a bit more points (am I counting points, not really ;) if you had made boyOrGirl accurate. I believe it's actually 55% for Girls.

Mike's entry:

1) Your note on duplicate child name - I bet many people forgot that. I know I did when I was thinking about the code in my head.

2) Slick bit of logic here:

arguments.gender == 'M' ? setFirst(firstnames['M'][randRange(1, arrayLen(firstnames['M']))]) : setFirst(firstnames['F'][randRange(1, arrayLen(firstnames['F']))]);

I'm not a fan of these operators as I find them a bit hard to read... but I dig that.

3) if (!isDefined("variables.children"))

I've seen this a few times now - I mean isDefined versus structKeyExists. Not a complaint - just noting it.

4) Bonus points for using Github. :)

Zach's entry:

1) Kinda important mistake you should make note of - in App.cfc, you should use this.name="...", not Application.name. That sets an Application scoped variable called name. It does not "name" the application.

2) Hmmm - interesting use of onRequest there. I normally do what you did in onRequestStart. But I kinda like how you used onRequest.

3) Hmm - I ran your code, but it only generates one generation. Was that intentional? Did you leave out something?

Before you pointed out the init function not returning this I would have agreed with you, but since the code runs I guess it doesn't. :) When using createObject(...).init() you have to return this, but maybe by using new Person() you don't need to anymore?

Ha, I should have thought to look up the boy/girl ratio.

Thanks for puzzler & for reviewing all the code. It's fun to see all the different takes on the same problem.

I appreciate the feedback. Those listToArray() function calls are a product of the "abbreviations" I have built into my editor (jEdit) - when I type "listtoarray" and press "space" then the full syntax for the function replaces my text. That's something I might change since 99 times out of 100 I use commas for lists.

As for the argument names you're right, I used shorthand because I know what they mean (identity, gender, family name and type) and I don't live verbose code, but they're non-intuitive for others.

Total oversight on the "s" ending on the names - that could have been handled so simply with an IIF().

If I were to refactor this I would switch to using implicit struct/array creation rather than longhand StructNew() and ArrayNew() - again, I need to update my abbreviations in jEdit or maybe take a look at CFBuilder.

It was a quick solution and I really enjoyed seeing everyone else's take on solving the puzzle. Thanks for putting this together - looking forward to future puzzlers!

1) Yeah, that was an oversight, i ran through making my Application.cfc really quickly.
3) It only dumps out the first person created, but you should be able to go down through his spouse and children.

I think the weirdest thing I did was fake static functionality. It drives me bonkers that CF doesn't have any good way to make static properties.

I know it's a bit late, but here is mine.
http://pastebin.com/uFVS5ffs
http://www.mymatisse.com/pr...

Any comments will be appreciated.

AXL:

1) I don't believe you need to set variables.*="" in your CFC. I think just the act of enabling accessors is enough. Now, you may get a null if you do getX() w/o running setX() first, so that (setting defaults) may be a good reason to do it.

BTW - your init function... next week I'm going to reveal something that will make that a LOT smaller in Zeus. ;)

2) Interesting use of a big array to handle randomness. Any reason why you just didn't use a randRange type check? Err what I mean is, something like randRange(1,10) < 2 or some such.

3) Nice job on the display page. Thanks.

Thank you for the comments, Ray.

1) I guess I tend to do variables.*="" things because of the book "Object-Oriented Programming in ColdFusion" I have read. They are not necessary just like you said. If I want to set default values, I could do that within 'init' functions by calling setters and getters. It's just another way of setting default values to properties.

Interesting! I won't be at MAX, but Ben mentioned a live online thing at his blog.
http://forta.com/blog/index...

If yours aren't available online in some reasons next week, could you post some details in here? I know you would do, but just making sure. That would be awesome.

2) I like yours. I just didn't think about that. That's a clever way comparing with mine. ^^;

3) Thank you very much for spending time on reviewing my code. It was fun and I really appreciate your feedback. Learning something every day.

My preso won't be online immediately, but it will be soon I think. As for details - I'm working on a plan for that now. Stay tuned.

Btw... thank you all for not complaining about how long it took for me to pick a winner. Personally I like all the entries. These contests were always decided in a very arbitrary manner (it IS meant to be fun - I run, from time to time, larger more series contests where the winner is definitely decided more seriously) but I have as of yet decided who that winner will be. By lunch - I'll decide, even if I have to randRange to pick. :)

In case you need some help deciding on a winner, I wrote a function for that:

function getWinner(prize){
var entries = ["Josh","Dan","Tyson","Mike","Zach","Axl"];
return IIF(arguments.prize == "awesome",DE(entries[1]),DE(entries[RandRange(1,ArrayLen(entries))]));
}

writeoutput(getWinner("awesome"));

Hahah, ok, so for having the cajones to do that, you're my winner.

Any objections from the rest of the crowd? If not - Joshua - ping me via email for your serial #s.

Hi, there:
I now that this Puzzle is just for fun but, if you want to write real life in this kind of Trees, what about if either father and/or mother has brother/s and or sister/s of several father/s and/or mothers? This stands for several marriadge.
Please, forget it if already done. :)
Best regards.

You know What I think you should do. Give all of them who have submitted their code a free copy except me since I didn't submit it on time. At least these five people spent a quit time on this puzzle to entertain, and come on in a few days it's MAX. Can Adobe help you to have a little preopening party here? Where did Oprah go?

+Emilo: Yeah, that would definitely be more realistic. But also quite a bit more complex. :)

+AXL: Heh, I'm no Oprah. ;)