First Impressions and Thoughts on Rosalind Project
By Güngör Budak
- 2 minutes read - 284 wordsActually, I signed up Rosalind.info 8 months ago, I didn’t really play around with it. But last week, in a BiGCaT science cafe, after I learnt it, I was more interested than before and I just started solving problems.
In each problem, you have a description about the context and also about the problem. Also, there is a sample input and output. Sometimes there are hints about the solution. What I did was to write a solution that works for the sample and hopefully for the problem. I wrote the scripts in Python, because the project says it is optimized for that and also I want to learn more about Python.
After submitting the solution, if it is successful, you can see the suggested solutions coming from other users. Each solution is really unique and worth checking out. In this way, you can also learn new approaches. And, the project directs you the next question which is available and good to be solved after that solution, which is nice, too. Moreover, there are user success statistics, such as top 100 and by country. This might help users to be motivated by competition. From Turkey, there are only seven users and they don’t look like solving problems right now, but I hope there will be more.
There are many badges that can be earned after certain amount of successful solutions and they are motivating you to continue.
My username on Rosalind is gungorbudak. I have solved all the problems in “Python Village” and some from “Bioinformatics Stronghold”. I will go on solving more in my spare time.
Rosalind is a good way to learn programming and basics in biology, genetics, statistics, computer science and bioinformatics.