Topic

Ten Ways to Fizz Buzz
By: Joel Grus
Date: July 9, 2020, 6 p.m.

Fizz Buzz is the following (simple) problem:

Print the numbers from 1 to 100, except that if the number is divisible by 3, instead print "fizz"; if the number is divisible by 5, instead print "buzz"; and if the number is divisible by 15, instead print "fizzbuzz".

My association with this problem began in 2016, when I wrote a blog post called Fizz Buzz in Tensorflow, the (possibly fictional) story of one such insulted programmer who decided to show up his interviewer by approaching Fizz Buzz as a deep learning problem. This post went modestly viral, and ever since then I have been seen as a thought leader in the Fizz Buzz space.

Accordingly, over the years I have come up with and/or collected various other stupid and/or clever ways of solving Fizz Buzz. I have not blogged about them, as I am not the sort of person who beats a joke to death, but occasionally I will tweet about them, and recently in response someone suggested that I write a book on "100 Ways of Writing Fizz Buzz in Python."

Now, I could probably come up with 100 ways of solving Fizz Buzz, but most of them would not be very interesting. Luckily for you, I was able to come up with 10 that are interesting in various ways, which I will barrel through in 15 minutes or less.