Code golf idea: you know when you want stack some books and it's really annoying one book is shorter but wider than another, so no matter how you order them, there's a bit of the top book hanging over the lower one? How about you get as input a list of book dimensions and you're to sort them so as to minimise the total overhanging area throughout the stack?
The Ackermann function is notable for being the one of the simplest examples of a total, computable function that isn't primitive recursive.
We will use the definition of A(m,n) taking in two nonnegative integers where
A(0,n) = n+1
A(m,0) = A(m-1,1)
A(m,n) = A(m-1,A(m,n-1))
You may implement
...
Computer Logic Puzzles
code-golf
Challenge
Your program will supplied with some code in the language of your choice, the output of that code and the input (if any). The thing is that code will have two lines removed and replaced with comments. Your aim is to write a program which works out wha...
Book Stack Sort
When stacking books you usually want to put the largest ones at the bottom and the smallest ones at the top. However, my latent OCD makes me feel very uneasy if I've got two books where one is shorter but wider than other (or vice-versa). No matter which order I place them in, th...
can someone else please do me a favour and google ".net regex syntax" to check if my balancing groups post on SO really is on the first page for that? :D (might just be personalised search results or something)
I wanted code-golf and not fastest-code because IMO fastest-code on Ackermann looks like special-casing each of m=0..3 and then relying on a hyperexponent for m>3.
Cool once in the first language, and then again in the fastest language, but that's it.
@MartinBüttner Now there's a thought.
Oh, also, @MartinBüttner: I didn't even realize that some languages would have restrictive recursion limits.
I think that it'd be okay to reconfig your language to fix that. Should I update to say all configuration costs no chars, or only the recursion limit can be redefined, or what?
I've noticed that 20 questions are tagged [function]. Looking at the questions themselves, they don't seem to have anything drastically different from other questions.
The tag wiki reads:
For challenges that ask for a function or involve functions in some way. (Also known as methods or subro...
@MartinBüttner That would be very ideal, but the mod tools don't offer a direct way to do it. So I'd have to do it manually. Which is fine, but then the comment will have the wrong sender.
@Doorknob: Please note that I take your deleting my answer in the Jump-the-Digit challenge extremely personally. If I'd known that a bit of satire would upset you so thoroughly that you'd unilaterally eradicate my response, 270 rep, and dozens of comments, I'm a reasonable man and I'd have deleted the entry myself.
As it stands, you couldn't be bothered to ask me or even notify me here, you unilaterally wiped out an answer that the broader community clearly considers acceptable, and you totally invalidated the three hours of work I spent writing the code.
Your action was heavy-handed, grossly disproportionate to the magnitude of the "offense", and I resent it regardless of whether you were acting in good faith. That is all, sir. - Miffed COTO
/me looks at COTO's post to see what all that is about.
@COTO Also, like, the proper venue for this is probably via a moderator flag.
@COTO To be honest, for what it's worth, I'd have nuked your entry too. (And I have nuked even higher-scoring non-entries.) I think I'm the person who wrote the "all entries must be serious contender" rule, so I follow it more tightly than others might.
@ChrisJester-Young Thanks, Chris. I don't want to drag this out. I'm not going to undelete the answer or flag a moderator. My answer technically wasn't in compliance with the topic rules anyway.
@ChrisJester-Young My ire stems more from the circumstances of how he did it. Like a bloody bull in a china shop. Give me ten minutes and I would've placed a "serious" Java solution in plain sight in the same answer as the functional-but-obviously-not-serious-enough version. Problem resolved.
@ChrisJester-Young I know, which is why I'm not undeleting it. Having said that, there can't possibly be a serious Java solution. The best possible Java solution I found was 156 characters long, didn't handle dashes, and was utterly unremarkable except for possibly the brazen idiocy of submitting Java code to a code golf challenge. Hence the satire.
As for "you should not have received any rep for...", many big name contributors here have assured me that upvotes and downvotes are entirely at the discretion of the voters and are governed by no rules whatsoever, hence "should" has no meaning with respect to rep earned through voting.
@COTO Well, bogus answers would (at best) be community wiki'd or converted to comment or (at worst) be deleted, none of which will confer any rep for you, regardless of any upvotes.
@COTO If 156 characters is the shortest Java solution then that's a serious entry. As usual, code golf isn't about getting the green check mark but squeezing as many bytes out of your language of choice as possible.
It's also about having fun, providing the community with creative answers, and making the best of a bad situati--- oh, nope. Sorry. It wasn't "seriously" golfed, so who gives a care what the community thinks and let's ignore the unique circumstances of the question, into the junk bin it goes.
@COTO Just so you know, this site was created because Stack Overflow did not tolerate code golf questions (despite it being "fun" and popular with the community). So just because something is popular does not make it a go.
I've posted a number of golf questions on SO back in the early days, all of which have been closed precisely because it's not tolerated on SO.
To commemorate the public launch of Stack Overflow, what's the shortest code to cause a stack overflow? Any language welcome.
ETA: Just to be clear on this question, seeing as I'm an occasional Scheme user: tail-call "recursion" is really iteration, and any solution which can be converted to an ...
@COTO I still don't think you're in a position to find any reaction to your answer offensive. You were lucky that the OP himself found it funny and thought about making it a popcon. But technically, you're answer was taking the piss, ridiculing the question and implying that it's too boring to golf, so you did something more fun. Another question author might have found that offensive.
@MartinBüttner If the OP had deleted the answer, or made any indication whatsoever that he considered it offensive, I would have deleted. As I said, it's not my intent to upset people. As it stands, (s)he didn't, and I didn't.
@MartinBüttner And the deletions no-doubt cheesed so many people off that they created a whole new SE board for them.
@ChrisJester-Young There are tens of millions of active users on SO. There's maybe 50 here. Take the Gini coefficient on the rep distribution for the past year and you'd get pretty darn close to zero. It's not unreasonable to make a one-to-one "please edit or delete" request here. That's the bare minimum of courtesy I'd extend as a mod of a small board, at any rate.
@COTO Why air dirty laundry publicly? (Note that there is no means to privately contact users except for "mod messages", which are for serious breaches of site rules.)
So far in the nearly 4 years this site has been around, only 5 mod messages have been written. It's very rarely used.
Also, there were comments on the post for a few hours before deletion, clearly stating that it didn't meet the rules. Just because they weren't posted by diamonds doesn't make them invalid.
@Calvin'sHobbies If you look at the revision history, you can scroll to version one and hover over the "9 hours ago" or "3 days ago" to get a timestamp.
I guess so. So, to summarize what you gentlemen are saying: content being unceremoniously wiped out, without warning, for minor infractions, and in spite of community feedback (i.e. voting), is commonplace and them's just the breaks?
I'm pretty sure that the majority of votes on your question was not by active PPCG people... anyone with the association bonus can upvote... but only people who are active here can downvote. this skews the "but it was popular" thing even more.
Also, you'll note that the accepted answer to your linked question on meta.SE is "I may be in the minority, but I say no. You should downvote it or leave a comment explaining why it breaks the rules." and cites a meta.SE rule stating "Answers that are answers but are factually wrong or are actively bad (say promote SQL Injection) should get downvoted, but not deleted."
@Geobits You mean the part that says "If you delete answers that don't meet the spec, you're simply inviting more answers that break the same rules, because nobody can tell it's already been tried and shot down. Showing people that we downvote might discourage that."?
How is October 13 still on the transcript? Don't you guys say anything funny or have any kind of strong opinion that is exactly opposite to mine when I am not here?
@ChrisJester-Young I guess it's too late now, but to do the thing you were trying to do: Edit the answer to change it to a pastebin link (or whatever), mod -> convert to comment, paste a link to the thing you want it to be a comment on, submit.
Book Stack Sort
code-golfarray-manipulationsorting
When stacking books you usually want to put the largest ones at the bottom and the smallest ones at the top. However, my latent OCD makes me feel very uneasy if I've got two books where one is shorter but wider than the other. No matter which o...
It's quite tough to come up with ones, where I'm certain of their correctness without writing a solution myself, but they do cover all the relevant cases: identical elements, 0-overlap solutions, ambiguous solutions, solutions that can be sorted by total area, and solutions that can't.
If no one spots any problems, I'll probably post it in an hour or two.
@COTO First of all, this was by no means a unilateral action. The post had several "not an answer" flags by various community members, and other users clearly voiced their objection in the comments. Secondly, the score of a post and how many votes it has is mostly if not completed irrelevant when I decide how to handle a flag or a problematic question/answer. (Think a la code-trolling.) cont...
... (cont.) Finally, deletion isn't really an outstanding thing on Stack Exchange; we're not afraid to maintain site quality, and removing objectionable content (soft-deleting, not completely nuking, mind you) isn't all that exceptional of an occurrence. We can doubtlessly both agree that your answer was not, in fact, a golfed solution to the challenge presented, and while it made me laugh, "joke" or "just for fun" answers are more in the style of Reddit / forum-like sites, rather than SE.
@COTO you said you weren't around when code trolling was a thing. this is actually relevant to the discussion, you might want to read the discussions about it meta.codegolf.stackexchange.com/q/1514/8478. Code trolling was literally intended to get answers like yours. And it was really popular - with people from other SE sites who found through the HNQ. And the discussion revolved a lot around fun & popularity vs quality standards. So it might be an interesting read.
@MartinBüttner I don't even know what "code trolling" is. Maybe we should start with that. Any kind of satirical answer, I take it, regardless of popularity, relevance, the effort needed to produce the code, and quality? Believe it or not, there isn't a single link to a "code-trolling" question on your meta link, and clicking the tag leads to a dead end. So what exactly is and isn't code trolling?
@COTO Code trolling doesn't exist any more. It was a type of underhanded popularity contest which asked for trolling answers. Most questions were in the form of a really bad give-me-teh-codez SO question and answers were supposed to take the piss.
So... the first one I visited has more answer upvotes than the 80 most recently asked questions combined. I think it also has more answers than the 80 most recently asked questions too. And it was... somehow... diminishing the quality of the board?
OP of codegolf.stackexchange.com/q/40150/194 just edited to answer one question, so I presume the reason he hasn't edited to answer mine is that he doesn't understand it or doesn't want to answer it. Does anyone have suggestions for alternative phrasings which might make it clearer what the problem is and why it needs fixing?
@COTO It was the direct cause of more utter crap being posted in one week than the entire content that has been posted in the last month.
@COTO it gets 3.8 ;) (we're on a bit of a recession though, it used to be above 5)
@COTO You're still arguing by its popularity. That does not make it a good challenge. The main problem with code trolling was that all questions were like "write code that can do whatever you want as long you can somehow claim it's related to the topic I've given you"
@COTO The good code-trolling challenges were sparse. They took the fall with the terrible challenges, which were plentiful. The real problem with them was that, by definition, everything labelled code-trolling was automatically on topic and designed to be ugly.
@Rainbolt I saw that one. And the "multiply without + or *" one. They're popular, full of wonderfully creative answers. The most popular answers seem to be the most creative and on-topic ones. I guess I just don't see the problem. Unless there were like 3+ of them per day.
Is this stuff documented anywhere remotely visible? I skimmed the site rules when I first came on, and there's nothing about "code trolling" anywhere. Even the "satirical answer = code trolling = not an answer" rule is subsumed by the broader "off-topic" rule, which I didn't even consider since as far as I was concerned, whether or not something is satirical has nominally nothing to do with whether it's off-topic. "I like turtles." in a question about how to write a loop is "off topic".
Oh, I guess @TimTech was right. From the old tag wiki: "For code-trolling the winning criteria would normally be popularity-contest, but this will not be implied."
I guess it just turned out that way 99.9% of the time, so I assumed that's how it was.
@MartinBüttner Putting it in codegolf.stackexchange.com/help/deleted-answers would help. That's one of the 6 questions that comes up on the main page of the help center. It lists several examples of off-topic answers, all of which I would consider to be "obviously" off-topic.
It's already been 1,082 days in beta, and I'd like to see our site graduating sometime in the near future. James Khoury proposed aiming for the 1,337th day since beta started, and I like that idea, especially since it's only in 255 days.
I'd suggest increasing the voting going around so our us...
Deadfish is one of the best known non Turing-complete programming languages. It has only one accumulator (which starts at 0) to store data, and only four commands:
i - Increment the accumulator
s - Square the accumulator
d - Decrement the accumulator
o - Output the accumulator
A Deadfish progr...
When stacking books you usually want to put the largest ones at the bottom and the smallest ones on top. However, my latent OCD makes me feel very uneasy if I've got two books where one is shorter but wider than the other. No matter which order I place them in, the top book will extend beyond the...
It might be equivalent to Hamiltonian path in some given metric, but I'm not sure which metric and that doesn't guarantee that it would be NP-complete. I was just about to go to bed, and I'm already half asleep, so that's as much of an answer as I'm willing to commit to right now.
@xnor I think if you have that case, you can probably collapse those vertices into one, removing edges pointing to intermediate vertices. Could it be possible to reduce Hamiltonian path to it after that step?
The Ackermann function is notable for being the one of the simplest examples of a total, computable function that isn't primitive recursive.
We will use the definition of A(m,n) taking in two nonnegative integers where
A(0,n) = n+1
A(m,0) = A(m-1,1)
A(m,n) = A(m-1,A(m,n-1))
You may implement
...
Computer Logic Puzzles
code-golf
Challenge
Your program will supplied with some code in the language of your choice, the output of that code and the input (if any). The thing is that code will have two lines removed and replaced with comments. Your aim is to write a program which works out wha...
I've noticed that 20 questions are tagged [function]. Looking at the questions themselves, they don't seem to have anything drastically different from other questions.
The tag wiki reads:
For challenges that ask for a function or involve functions in some way. (Also known as methods or subro...
Crack of xnor's 340-area answer
No cryptographic mumbo-jumbo for me.
Code:
10000001111111222
22388892357889356
69968999352143221
80867227952780811
a=23333333444444
b=71122368066667
c=47948316823798
d=79254432699451
496857235742
579159386011
606961806231
pow(a,b,c)-d
626562...
The home page is blank for me. It is the same with meta. Anyone else with ideas/solutions/problems?
Deadfish is one of the best known non Turing-complete programming languages. It has only one accumulator (which starts at 0) to store data, and only four commands:
i - Increment the accumulator
s - Square the accumulator
d - Decrement the accumulator
o - Output the accumulator
A Deadfish progr...
