Ruby... To The Death!

  So.. You think your Ruby-fu is pretty good huh? Why not put your skills to the ultimate test, and pit your fu against some friendly competition! At Mur.derlicio.us, that's how we roll.

Mur.derlicio.us is an automated ruby testing system. What you see at right are some of the 'Challenges' of the site. To pass a challenge, you simply have to follow the description provided, and make your code output what's specified in the instructions. Easy, right? Well, not always. The challenges are sorted by difficulty (as you can see), so hopefully there's something here for every level of ruby-expertise.

Rules and Regulations...

So, I'm sure some of you are thinking: this must be the fattest security hole ever designed by a rails developer. Well, you'd be right to assume, but you'll find that dangerous ruby code will simply not be evaluated and infinite loops will be killed by process control. If you can think of another way to muck up my server, then you probably deserve to. This site is made possible (and secure) by whytheluckystiff's FreakyFreaky Sandbox.

Process control will kill any code longer than 50 seconds. Which I may modify in the future depending on if my hosting company is even going to let this happen. Anyway - I'm making sure nothing does (in fact) take that long by making ABSOLUTELY sure that my own solutions to the challenges will run (on the server) in the specified timeout limit.

Note that input for some of the challenges (those which require your script manipulates some form of input) will ALWAYS be provided in the global variable $input, so your uploaded solutions must assume that this is the case, and parse the $input variable, and manipulate (and output) your data from there. Also note your entire solution must be a SINGLE .rb file which you will upload.

Questions, Comments, Concerns, new Challenge Ideas...

If you've got anything at all you'd like to discuss with me about mur.derlicio.us, please email me directly at sikanrong@gmail.com, my name is Alex Pilafian (a.k.a sikanrong), and I'm the guy who wrote (and maintains) this site. Please also send any new ideas for more tests to that e-mail. If you do, PLEASE include a solution to your proposed test so I can examine the full scope of the issue. Note that More tests will be added in the near future, I'm only building/maintaining this site on the weekends, so my time is a bit limited.