@Quincunx I thought it was due to the early history of USPS. After the Pony Express, they started using religious organizations since there were churches in most towns. Hence, the nun.
@Geobits That reminds me of something my Grandad says about WWII.
Neither he nor the other men in his battalion spoke French, but he'd been to a good school and spoke Latin. So whenever they arrived at a town, they would find the local priest and speak to him in Latin.
Good thinking. Any time I needed something in Japan that couldn't be explained with hand motions and my limited Japanese, a local Starbucks was perfect. They tend to hire mostly bilingual there.
@mniip My multi-threaded programming experience in any language is rather limited (like I know the concepts and some theory, but I've never actually used it, apart from annotating a loop in C with #pragma omp parallel for), so I don't really want to look into it for Ruby right now (which I'm not that familiar with anyway)
@Geobits The languages I'm really comfortable with seem rather unsuitable for a code-challenge controller. Ruby seems to be very convenient for the large part of the code, and I'd really like to learn more Ruby anyway.
So I need an opinion here (ideally from KotH hosters and participants, both). I need some form of time out, to make sure that solutions scale linearly (well and to ensure that I ever get a result when benchmarking solutions). Since this is a game with multiple moves, where the communication goes back and forth between controller and bot, would you prefer:
To be told the time limit at the beginning of the game and keep track yourself.
To be told the remaining time at each single turn.
Not care because you wouldn't use it in your implementation anyway. (and instead just make sure that your algorithm runs in reasonable time for the given benchmark tests)
Hmm. If you're doing it that way, you probably need to give remaining time each turn. There could be a bit of a difference each turn between what I clock and what you clock, and those would add up each turn.
The advantage would be that you wouldn't have to worry about IO or stuff slowing down the playout and you not being able to finish the game after planning it all out nicely.
I like the idea of a game clock, though. It would make it beneficial to estimate how many turns you'll need early on, so you can cut yourself off if you're exceeding the average.
@Geobits still, if there's only a game clock, you might think you can still finish the game by making quick or precomputed moves, but end up timing out because suddely IO hangs for a bit, or you just misjudged the average move time you can do
What do you think about the hybrid case? Say the maximum number of turns is 60. You get a budget of 60 seconds, but time will only be taken from that budget, if any single turn takes longer than one second.
Is it going overboard to make something like this for people who want to participate in my challenge but don't know exactly what does to stdout? docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/…
That document is open edit btw, so add to your heart's content
I'm just thinking that 90 people starred the wolf question and I got 50 answers. What happened to the other 40? I am lowering the learning curve for them.
I'll just trash it. They can ask if they don't know.
The Problem
The sandbox will be a problem when we graduate (hopefully soon!) As it is already, the people who look through the sandbox regularly are very little in number. What happens when we graduate, bringing in more traffic? Three problems:
It won't be worth it to post in the sandbox, sinc...
still, yours is an interesting opinion, even though I disagree, especially after having started programming in Go, which hides async I/O behind goroutines
Good Versus Evil
Insert fancy graphic of angel fighting demon drawn by brother here.
Introduction
The angels and demons are fighting and, as usual, using earth as their battleground. Humans are stuck in the middle and are being forced to take sides. An unknown neutral force rewards those who...
@Rusher to me, the more important gotcha is that you've got to remember to flush your out-buffer in many languages.
Also, I tend to star challenges even if I never had any intention to participate (not because of difficulty or anything, just in general), but where I'm interested in seeing what people come up with
Likewise, I rarely star questions where I'm writing an answer, because I know I can find it in my answered questions
@PeterTaylor I don't usually look through my favourited questions unless I am specifically looking for something. If I am specifically looking for something, I usually remember if I answered that question or not. If I answered it, I'm quicker searching for it than browsing through my favourites anyway.
@Geobits @PeterTaylor I added some changes regarding the time limit: meta.codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/1695/8478 Is that better now? I'm still slightly worried what to do if anyone manages to find an optimal algorithm that runs in O(n²).
Hm, fair enough. I think it leads to more frustration though and it doesn't seem viable if PPCG ever becomes active enough such that sorting by active questions gets unbearable (if you're sorting by new questions, you won't notice any more that any question made it past the sandboxing stage).