Oh, but they are riddles. Hanoi tower, permutations, travelling salesman kind of problems. Algorithmically tricky (not hard, the problems are in textbooks for ages), but trivial from a programming perspective. The kind of problems that a physics major would think constitutes programming, but mostly irrelevant to complexity met in either the industry or CS academia.
I do some machining as a hobby; there are decades old teasers like turning a cube inside a hollow cube on a lathe from a piece of round stock. I feel like those are very much like Olympiad problems in nature, and just as remote from real-life machining exercises.
I do some machining as a hobby; there are decades old teasers like turning a cube inside a hollow cube on a lathe from a piece of round stock. I feel like those are very much like Olympiad problems in nature, and just as remote from real-life machining exercises.