Problem: Mario

tl;dr

Implement a program that prints out a half-pyramid of a specified height, per the below.

$ ./mario
Height: 5
    #
   ##
  ###
 ####
#####

$ ./mario
Height: 3
  #
 ##
###

Academic Honesty

This course’s philosophy on academic honesty is best stated as "be reasonable." The course recognizes that interactions with classmates and others can facilitate mastery of the course’s material. However, there remains a line between enlisting the help of another and submitting the work of another. This policy characterizes both sides of that line.

The essence of all work that you submit to this course must be your own. Collaboration on problems is not permitted (unless explicitly stated otherwise) except to the extent that you may ask classmates and others for help so long as that help does not reduce to another doing your work for you. Generally speaking, when asking for help, you may show your code or writing to others, but you may not view theirs, so long as you and they respect this policy’s other constraints. Collaboration on quizzes and tests is not permitted at all. Collaboration on the final project is permitted to the extent prescribed by its specification.

Below are rules of thumb that (inexhaustively) characterize acts that the course considers reasonable and not reasonable. If in doubt as to whether some act is reasonable, do not commit it until you solicit and receive approval in writing from your instructor. If a violation of this policy is suspected and confirmed, your instructor reserves the right to impose local sanctions on top of any disciplinary outcome that may include an unsatisfactory or failing grade for work submitted or for the course itself.

Reasonable

  • Communicating with classmates about problems in English (or some other spoken language).

  • Discussing the course’s material with others in order to understand it better.

  • Helping a classmate identify a bug in his or her code, such as by viewing, compiling, or running his or her code, even on your own computer.

  • Incorporating snippets of code that you find online or elsewhere into your own code, provided that those snippets are not themselves solutions to assigned problems and that you cite the snippets' origins.

  • Reviewing past years' quizzes, tests, and solutions thereto.

  • Sending or showing code that you’ve written to someone, possibly a classmate, so that he or she might help you identify and fix a bug.

  • Sharing snippets of your own solutions to problems online so that others might help you identify and fix a bug or other issue.

  • Turning to the web or elsewhere for instruction beyond the course’s own, for references, and for solutions to technical difficulties, but not for outright solutions to problems or your own final project.

  • Whiteboarding solutions to problems with others using diagrams or pseudocode but not actual code.

  • Working with (and even paying) a tutor to help you with the course, provided the tutor does not do your work for you.

Not Reasonable

  • Accessing a solution to some problem prior to (re-)submitting your own.

  • Asking a classmate to see his or her solution to a problem before (re-)submitting your own.

  • Decompiling, deobfuscating, or disassembling the staff’s solutions to problems.

  • Failing to cite (as with comments) the origins of code, writing, or techniques that you discover outside of the course’s own lessons and integrate into your own work, even while respecting this policy’s other constraints.

  • Giving or showing to a classmate a solution to a problem when it is he or she, and not you, who is struggling to solve it.

  • Looking at another individual’s work during a quiz or test.

  • Paying or offering to pay an individual for work that you may submit as (part of) your own.

  • Providing or making available solutions to problems to individuals who might take this course in the future.

  • Searching for, soliciting, or viewing a quiz’s questions or answers prior to taking the quiz.

  • Searching for or soliciting outright solutions to problems online or elsewhere.

  • Splitting a problem’s workload with another individual and combining your work (unless explicitly authorized by the problem itself).

  • Submitting (after possibly modifying) the work of another individual beyond allowed snippets.

  • Submitting the same or similar work to this course that you have submitted or will submit to another.

  • Using resources during a quiz beyond those explicitly allowed in the quiz’s instructions.

  • Viewing another’s solution to a problem and basing your own solution on it.

Background

Toward the end of World 1-1 in Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers, Mario must ascend a "half-pyramid" of blocks before leaping (if he wants to maximize his score) toward a flag pole. Below is a screenshot.

Super Mario Brothers

Specification

  • Write, in a file called mario.c in your ~/chapter1/mario/ directory, a program that recreates a similar half-pyramid using hashes (#) for blocks.

  • To make things more interesting, first prompt the user for the half-pyramid’s height, a non-negative integer no greater than 8.

  • If the user fails to provide a non-negative integer no greater than 8, you should re-prompt for the same again.

  • Then, generate (with the help of printf and one or more loops) the desired half-pyramid.

  • Take care to align the bottom-left corner of your half-pyramid with the left-hand edge of your terminal window.

Walkthrough

Usage

Your program should behave per the example below. Assumed that the underlined text is what some user has typed.

$ ./mario
Height: 4
   #
  ##
 ###
####
$ ./mario
Height: 0
$ ./mario
Height: -5
Height: 4
   #
  ##
 ###
####
$ ./mario
Height: -5
Height: five
Retry: 40
Height: 24
Height: 4
   #
  ##
 ###
####

Testing

Correctness

check50 cs50/problems/2019/ap/mario/less

Style

style50 mario.c

Staff Solution

If you’d like to play with the staff’s own implementation of mario, you may execute the below.

~cs50/2019/ap/chapter1/less/mario

Hints

Try to establish a relationship between (a) the height the user would like the pyramid to be, (b) what row is currently being printed, and (c) how many spaces and how many hashes are in that row. Once you establish the formula, you can translate that to C!

How to Submit

Step 1 of 2

Ensure that mario.c is in ~/chapter1/mario, as with:

cd ~/chapter1/mario
ls

If mario.c is not in ~/chapter1/mario, move it into that directory, as via mv (or via CS50 IDE’s lefthand file browser).

Step 2 of 2

  • To submit mario, execute

    cd ~/chapter1/mario
submit50 cs50/problems/2019/ap/mario/less

    inputting your GitHub username and GitHub password as prompted.

If you run into any trouble, email sysadmins@cs50.harvard.edu!

You may resubmit any problem as many times as you’d like before the deadline.

Your submission should be graded for correctness within 2 minutes, at which point your score will appear at submit.cs50.io

This was Mario.