The Nineteenth Byte - 2015-06-17 (page 1 of 2)

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New Sandboxed Posts

12:04 AM

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Suggestions for [adjective] are more than welcome, as well as possible complications that I've looked over. Determine how [adjective] a number is (code-golf) A number would be considered [adjective] if 0 is the result of multiplying its digits together, then multiplying the digits of the resu...

2 hours later…

2:31 AM

@Calvin'sHobbies I've finally sandboxed my Ant QotH and it seems to have a good response so I'll be cannibalising your Stack Snippets for that instead of my earlier idea now. I haven't started writing the controller yet and already I feel like my spec is too long...

Calvin's Hobbies

2:57 AM

@trichoplax Looks well explained, but yes, long :P I'd say for the sake of simplicity, if there are game mechanics you're on the fence about it, then forget or at least simplify them. Makes more answers likely, which is very desirable for this kind of challenge

Thanks - yes I also think simpler is better

Calvin's Hobbies

Note that I had to minify the JS/HTML/CSS in my snippets to get under the 30k limit. Though you probably noticed that.

I did consider a really stripped down version in an attempt to make it solvable by a lookup table, so arbitrary languages could be easily converted to JS, but it needed to be so simplified there was barely anything left, so I ditched that idea

Yes I know you minified them - that's why it was handy that you included the "ungolfed" code in jsfiddle (or I wouldn't have been able to learn anything from it...)

I thought I had a pretty simple idea until I transferred it from paper to the sandbox, and now it looks quite involved...

Calvin's Hobbies

I'm glad it's useful :) I should say that the BBBF code is a tad more organized and portable than the RvB code, just fyi.

I'll be starting from scratch for the ants so I'll definitely have a look over the BBBF code this time. I have a head start on the understanding this time so hopefully it shouldn't take too long

I'm half considering keeping the code in jsfiddle but I would much prefer it to all be self-contained

The only game mechanic I'm undecided on is the number of colours, and that doesn't seem likely to affect the code length or spec length. I can't think of anything that could be removed without losing the concept

Calvin's Hobbies

3:07 AM

@trichoplax Definitely. It's a bit of a hassle to keep the fiddle updated as well as the minified snippet but I'm sure that the casual SE users are much more likely to run a snippet than a fiddle.

@Calvin'sHobbies Exactly - experienced users aren't the ones who need it. I'd like to provide a potential stepping stone for new users

I'm currently reading about multiple canvases so I can have a zoom on hover effect, and hoping that it can be implemented without too much extra code length...

If I can't get that to fit in the code, then the arena will need to be about half the height and half the width to fit on smaller screens

@Calvin'sHobbies While you're here, what do you use for editing JavaScript?

Calvin's Hobbies

@trichoplax I mostly just used JSFiddle itself. Everything is in easy reach, including the output.

I've been editing directly in jsfiddle so far, but wondering if there's a better way. In particular I'm being slowed down by the broken search (it only seems to search nearby code once the code gets considerably bigger than the pane).

use Vim! :P

Calvin's Hobbies

Ah, yeah, I've been annoyed by that too

Why is doorknob purple?

3:15 AM

Or install Pentadactyl for Firefox and hit Ctrl+I to pop out a $EDITOR instance from the browser. That way you get JSFiddle + your favorite editor.

I almost raised it as a bug, but then couldn't reproduce it, but I've seen it more since writing longer code so I might raise it after all (if it isn't already)

@Doorknob Have you run out of new reasons for your avatar yet...?

I see you've gone for super-villain purple and green

Calvin's Hobbies

@trichoplax I don't think JS Bin has the problem. But they require semicolons, which I found annoying

@Calvin'sHobbies When I was being greased (because doorknobs can get rusty), the guy accidentally used the wrong chemicals.

in Tavern on the Meta on Meta Stack Exchange Chat, 6 hours ago, by Doorknob

(I'm gonna make up a different story every time someone asks me that :P)

Does it count if I now ask you too, even though I've just seen that explanation?

in Tavern on the Meta on Meta Stack Exchange Chat, yesterday, by Homegrown Tomato

In my version of reality JS requires semicolons.

Please help make this reality...

@trichoplax No, my story generation API quota has been exceeded for now. furiously attempts to make up more stories

3:21 AM

If it makes you happy, you can also write python with semicolon terminated lines

Calvin's Hobbies

@trichoplax I was about to say that, and argue that since you almost never see semicoloned Python, why should they be in JS?

Because JS has a more C-like syntax. Also weirdness with lines that begin with (.

Also, it's just a convention, and your code is harder to read without them.

I've been writing JS without semicolons, because I never use any of the cases where that would be a problem, but then every so often adding them in when I want jsfiddle's built in JSHint to tell me what I've done wrong (it won't tell me until I put all the semicolons in first...) :(

3:36 AM

C programmer chipping in -- Semicolons are love, semicolons are life.

lol

Some day, we will resort to using them to end sentences, too;

My JS is to go in a stack snippet that I'm going to have difficulty fitting into the 30,000 character limit, so the semicolons are going to have to go sooner or later...

Is @Calvin'sHobbies Arbitrary Stack Snippet Loader applicable?

I first encountered semicolons in prose, so when JS has them I read it a lot slower

3:39 AM

@BrainSteel glares at lack of semicolons

@BrainSteel I've been thinking about that recently. There are a few drawbacks but I might have to...

OH NO! CH, semicolons, ASAP!

The main drawback is probably having to create a whole new question somewhere to host the snippet which is... Inconvenient.

The main problems are that it doubles the number of API calls, and it would need agreement for leaving a meta question open purely for that purpose (unless I put it in the stack snippets sandbox on mother meta)

@BrainSteel yes that - exactly

How much slower is it really? Do we have data for that?

I'm not worried about speed

The API calls are limited to 300 per day per IP

I'd like to write it so that it only loads the answers once unless the page is refreshed, in which case 300 shouldn't be a problem

3:43 AM

Wait, really? Did not know that.

Unless you have your stack snippet blessed and added to some list

Interesting.

(I can't remember the exact details - there's some kind of sacrifice I think)

Do they take hardware sacrifices? Doorknob was a good moderator...

CH's code which I'm cannibalising reloads the answers each time the test code is updated, which means you pick up new answers, but I don't think that's essential for mine so I can probably get away with letting the user do a manual refresh if they want to check for new answers

I think Doorknob has been through enough recently. Have you seen the avatar colour...?

3:47 AM

Should we tell him?

And yeah, that's pretty reasonable, I think.

So I've gone from "that is a last resort" to "I can probably get away with hosting the code in a backwater of mother meta"

So maybe I don't need to golf the spec after all...

Although I do want people to read to the end, so I still have some editing to do

It is pretty lengthy.

It's longer than it was this morning - I've added various little edits plus some example strategies...

I definitely avoid a koth or similar challenge with a long, messy spec

I need to ask a question: "tips for golfing in English"

3:50 AM

I know that I'm going to misinterpret it, and that the controller will have bugs or not match the spec

@trichoplax vwls r wst f spc

@Doorknob gdpnt.Srspcs

The spec isn't messy imo, but it is unfortunately long. I think I would put the example strategies in example answers, not in the question.

@BrainSteel Yes the examples will definitely be in answers once it's posted (they will be there for people to compete against so they'll need to be). I've tried to make everything logical, but I expect I can condense some of it.

It seems you mention some similar things in a couple separate passages, (e.g. No memory and then No state, no time, no random) and you could probably condense that.

3:57 AM

Yes that needs work

Other than a bit of redundancy here and there, it seems a pretty reasonable length after you move the examples and remove the sandbox notes.

I was wondering if any of it could be summarised more succinctly with pictures, but having read through I'm not sure that would help

why no random? that's mean

exactly :)

random is a great way to make up for being isolated from the larger environment - so I confiscated it...

I want it all to be about the shared memory of the arena cells, which enemies can mess with

Mainly I see random as a type of saving state

that makes no sense

4:02 AM

It's the random seed that is really forbidden - they can generate pseudo random numbers as long as they only use the information available to them as the seed

an ideal random number generator has no state

Are we still talking pseudo random?

My thinking is as follows:

we assume the ideality of the random number generator in the vast majority of situations without problems

Part of the challenge is to decide how many food pieces to convert into workers, while still trying to maximise the number of food pieces held at the end of the game.

So I don't want the queen to know how many turns have passed, how many workers she has produced, or how often they are returning with food unless she stores this information in the arena cell colours. There's plenty of memory available but it is all accessible and writable by the enemies

were you going to explain how a random number generator is like saving a state?

4:10 AM

@feersum I think I've missed something. Unless we're talking about hardware random number generators, any RNG algorithm must have an input from which to generate the next number - whether that's stored internally or provided as a function argument.

Forget that. Suppose an ideal random number generator were available, would you want to forbid it?

OK, that makes sense. Yes I would still forbid it, because a random approach is much less susceptible to enemy interference

I'm interested in random approaches, I just don't want them in this particular game.

I am favor of random numbers because it seems more flukey without them

This doesn't rule out randomness altogether - the first example strategy is a random one

Every run of the game will be different

What do you mean? How can you follow a random strategy without random numbers?

4:14 AM

This is why I need to condense the spec - so it doesn't put people off reading it :)

I'm not reading it because I don't want to have a reaction to the Javascript

In order to prevent an ant from having any knowledge of its orientation other than what it encodes in the cell colours, its 3x3 neighbourhood is presented to it each turn in a different random orientation. This means that consistently giving the same output will not result in a straight line path, but a random walk

@feersum lol fair enough. There's no JS in it yet though...

So you can automatically follow a random path, but there are no random numbers for say, producing a new worker on 1 out of 10 turns

Calvin's Hobbies

@trichoplax My RvB code did that because the test entry was kind of a last minute thing. The BBBF code only reloads the answers when you hit the "Reload" button.

It should be easy enough to generate a worker around 1/10 with this random source available

probably there are more rules I don't know about though, so I should stop discussing it

@Calvin'sHobbies Excellent. Since I'll be working from that this time it should be that much more realistic to host the code on mother meta (if that isn't frowned upon). I'd still ideally like to fit it all in one post, but it's nice to know there's an alternative

Calvin's Hobbies

4:21 AM

And the stack snippet loader would work fine, but it does double the api calls and you need have the snippet somewhere, as has been mentioned.

this is the most ironic problem ever

Does the snippet need to be on PPCG? I was guessing putting it in the stack snippets sandbox on meta stack exchange would work

@feersum golfing a question on a golfing site?

being unable to shorten some code to under 30K characters on a golfing site

:)

Are there any spec shortening sites?

how long is the spec?

4:24 AM

@feersum I'm not looking to stop them using 1 in 10, just to make them use the arena

Calvin's Hobbies

@trichoplax It would. Just make the site string meta.codegolf instead of codegolf.

@Calvin'sHobbies No I meant mother meta rather than PPCG meta, but I'm guessing the same would apply

Calvin's Hobbies

@trichoplax Oh. Sure it would work, but they may consider the post off topic there.

@feersum On my little laptop screen, about 5 or 6 screens

Calvin's Hobbies

I mean, a dedicated ppcg meta question for these kind of things seems best

4:28 AM

@Calvin'sHobbies That would be ideal, but if that's not approved I was thinking in particular of this post:

33

Q: Stack Snippets Sandbox: Try It Out Here!

This post is dedicated to testing out the newly announced Stack Snippets feature. Feel free to answer with your own Stack Snippets!

discussion stack-snippets

@feersum (about 5 or 6 screens for the whole question)

5:06 AM

hi all

hi @feersum

hi @Lembik

@trichoplax I was just enjoying worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/7117/… :)

Oh good :)

It had an interesting variety of different answers...

I wanted to ask somewhere about whether anyone had any physically realisable ideas about civilisation that developed on Rogue Planets (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet )

but I am not sure which SE that would be for

maybe worldbuilding?

sorry if this is OT :)

That sounds very suited to worldbuilding - they have a sandbox like us now so you can fine tune your question there

5:18 AM

ah ok.. thanks

2 hours later…

7:48 AM

Hi there !

8:09 AM

Good morning!

8:20 AM

@rcrmn How are you !

speaking of stack snippets, when I first heard of them I looked into running GWT code in a snippet, but ran into some restrictions, does anybody know if there's a way around it?

0

A: Feedback requested: Runnable code snippets in questions and answers

Is gwt supported? I tried to make a snippet that uses gwt and I got: Uncaught SecurityError: Failed to read the 'sessionStorage' property from 'Window': The document is sandboxed and lacks the 'allow-same-origin' flag.

GWT?

ho, got it x)

Google Web Toolkit

Google Web Toolkit (GWT /ˈɡwɪt/), or GWT Web Toolkit, is an open source set of tools that allows web developers to create and maintain complex JavaScript front-end applications in Java. Other than a few native libraries, everything is Java source that can be built on any supported platform with the included GWT Ant build files (Requirements for Linux Apache ant and Firefox < 27 as GWT Chrome plugin for Linux will not work). It is licensed under the Apache License version 2.0. GWT emphasizes reusable approaches to common web development tasks, namely asynchronous remote procedure calls, history...

(was thinking GWT was the name of one of your challenge in this case x))

Honestly, I don't know, web programming is something I, well... kinda hate

@Katenkyo Fine, how's everything around?

8:26 AM

Nice, nonogram 15*60, a quarter done !

@rcrmn A little bit bored of designing nonograms for a fastest-code challenge x)

But fine anyway

a ninja walks into a bar, and says "ow! I didn't see that!"

Wow....

@Doorknob whatever, you can try the code now

9:20 AM

hi all

hi @MitchSchwartz

@aditsu what was the termite version?

@Lembik Hi !

Hi.. how things?

@Lembik Everything's going well. you?

Still slightly mystified by an answer feersum gave to one of my questions :)

I am hoping he/she will explain it!

on probabilities?

9:31 AM

2

A: Probabilities - how high can you go?

Python 2, j=2 I tried to find a sort of 'closed form' for j=2. Perhaps I could make a MathJax image of it, although it would be really ugly with all the index fiddling. I wrote this unoptimized code only to test the formula. It takes about 1 second to complete. The results match with Mitch Schwa...

I can't find a way to help you understand it... ^^'

35*60, 25 lines remaining ! \o/

@Lembik termite? what?

Good Wet Termites

o_O

groaning while tisking

@aditsu there was a termite-walks-into-a-bar joke earlier

but I can't remember how it went

@Katenkyo no problem.. hopefully feersum or someone else who loves math will help

9:44 AM

@Lembik I don't know any such joke

oh well :)

but google seems to have some results

Geobits
6:59 PM
So a termite walks into a bar. He goes up to the guy behind the counter and asks, "Hey, where's the bar tender?"

found it!

How can a ninja not see a bar ?

@Optimizer The bar was hidden?

9:46 AM

@Lembik apparently it was supposed to ask "is the bar(k)tender here?"

which part of the bar is tender?

is how I read it

assuming it's a wood bar :)

@Optimizer maybe it was wielded by another ninja :p or the mask was just affecting his vision

ninjas can see other ninja

they dont need eyes to see

or maybe he's not good at walking, not a natural thing for ninjas

or, more likely, he was a clumsy ninja in training

9:49 AM

And what if it's the bar who walks into the ninja because he didn't see it?

10:30 AM

a cat walks into a bar; the bartender asks "how's it going?", the cat responds: "not so well, I have to give all my output to grep"

4

too long to be funny

10:50 AM

although I still quite liked it :)

just needs polishing

in real life, output of a cat is not that good of a thing :P

@Optimizer That's why the cat always tries to hide his output

@Katenkyo no it doesn't

So what do you think he's doing by covering it?

a cat does not try to hide its output. it just s**ts around everywhere possible.

11:11 AM

I think we don't have the same definition for a cat, it's more like a dog there...

you definitely haven't pet a cat..

My girlfriend has 2 cats, and i spend most of my free time at her home. So it's kinda like

11:48 AM

I have 4 cats, they're generally very tidy with their stdout, but their stderr just goes wherever they happen to be at the moment

6

@aditsu Fortunately, cats have a error handler, whenever something goes by stderr, they try to clean it...

It usually makes their stderr being used again

12:20 PM

are we still on cats?? :)

no, we are now on high probabilities

long cat;

Martin Büttner

@Sp3000 any luck finding sub-60 in Mathematica?

(for refined partitions)

@MartinBüttner An idle mathematica question.. would it be faster than python for code like codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/51756/9206 ?

(Been busy so no, sorry)

12:25 PM

hi @Sp3000 I notice you are great at math :) Do you have any idea how to interpret codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/51756/9206 by any chance?

Martin Büttner

@Lembik I don't know how to tell without trying

@Sp3000 posting mine then

@MartinBüttner OK. Well if you were bored... :)

Martin Büttner

not exactly, sorry ;)

maybe over the weekend

no problem :)

that would be great too!

although I am still completely mystified by what he has done!

Martin Büttner

@Sp3000 posted

12:36 PM

@Sp3000 lilwaynehq.com/forums/lil-wayne/…

Yeah I'd never have gotten that, too many builtins I don't know :P

@Lembik Well I can explain the Python but I wouldn't be able to tell you what's going on/how it works...

@Sp3000 thanks! I think I understand the python.. it's how it works that is a total mystery to me

Obfuscation by binomial coefficients

:)

12:51 PM

random song time: youtube.com/watch?v=frNpdG4F9mw

1:09 PM

Hello :)

@Vioz- HI

I was hoping my question would have more than 2 answers by now

Haha, I just noticed it was yours x)

Didn't pay attention untill you pinged me in a comment x)

hmm, sudden urge to code an answer, although I have other things to do

1:25 PM

I'd like to see a CJam solution ;)

New Sandboxed Posts

1:37 PM

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Fizz Buzz Reverse Solver code-golf Synopsis: Given the output of a generalised FizzBuzz program, return the list of factors and words used for the program. Imagine a generalised FizzBuzz program that takes in as input a list of factors and words to use. For instance, if the input of this p...

@trichoplax maybe move to the chatroom if we want to discuss on this further, there's already a lot of comments

Good point :)

By the way, could I make one of my worker change behavior (deciding in certain case to change the function it's using, even for one turn)?

I see what you mean about a pattern of food distribution around the queen now. No I definitely want it to be random

Once a worker is created, it is of fixed type for the rest of its life

@trichoplax Ok, so it will be about covering the greatest area

Hum, yeah, makes sense, function could be used as states

1:48 PM

yes - taking into account that the queen can see one cell either side of her path, and trying to minimise the overlap with already searched areas

You can change the behaviour within a single function as much as you like, as long as it is decided based on what the ant can see, and not remembered from a previous turn

@trichoplax said like that, it was clearly forbidden.

cells colours are the same for both team?

I think what I need most now is to get the controller working and start testing some strategies. I'm working on the zoom at the moment, and whether than works will determine whether I can have the full 2000 by 1000 arena or restrict to something smaller that doesn't need zooming

I mean, If I set a cell to 15, my opponent will see it as 15 and will be able to modify it, right?

yes that's right - there is no randomisation of the colours, only the orientation

so an enemy player who has read your code will know what colours to use to control your ants

I was more asking that in term of layers, is the colour I set only setted for me

But that's sad, as we can't randomise them at the start :/

1:54 PM

no it is completely shared. If another ant changes the path you were going to use to find your way back to the queen then you will no longer see the same path on your way back

@Katenkyo Did you want to start with a randomized arena?

Will be hard to find something to counter that fact

@Katenkyo Oh I see - to stop other ants knowing what your colours mean from one game to the next

@trichoplax No, randomizing the colours i'll use during the game

@trichoplax that's it

yes. I don't mind it being difficult, but my only worry is that it may lead to edit wars, reassigning the colours without changing the strategy in order to get around an opponent

@trichoplax I'm sorry to say it, but I might do it... If I see an opponent looking for my colour and trying is best to not use it, because he saw that it was vital to me, I will change it

by looking I mean, he has some "attacking" workers looking for my colour

1:57 PM

This is one thing that makes me consider using more colours, maybe 256 or 1024

You could just call each one a nibble/byte/word/etc instead of color. I think ants are colorblind :P

256 would mean you can count all the turn with only 2 cells, which is a big advantage

Then you could use different colours each time by having a "palette" with a large number of colours meaning the same thing. Whichever one the queen randomly uses at the start, all her workers will stick to the same ones as they copy them out across their paths

@trichoplax The queen can't randomly use one

She'll start on a blank place, and we can use PRNG :)

@Geobits yes I only use colours because I'm thinking of the human audience and I want to fit as much information in as possible

2:00 PM

Colours was a good I dea as I represent which "colour pattern" would do what

@trichoplax Is the arena size set in stone? I was thinking of a simple strategy, but it would work much better if it was square torus instead of rectangle.

@Geobits always walking on diagonals to come back to the same point?

@Katenkyo I know it's limited but there is some opportunity for random choice. The queen can at least choose between 2 colour schemes based on whether the first piece of food she finds is diagonally adjacent or orthogonally adjacent. There may be other ways

Something using that, yes. So that it's equivalent to orthagonal movement.

@trichoplax Yeah, but I might want to use colours before finding food, to know where I've already searched

2:02 PM

@Geobits I like squares, but squarer screens have gone out of fashion so I'm likely to stick with rectangular.

@Katenkyo Yes those colours would need to be completely different - which does make it awkward...

@trichoplax Yes, the first colour I use to say "i've been here" would be different than the one used after finding the food

@Geobits I toyed with the idea of offsetting the wrapping so that orthogonal lines would not come back to the same starting point first time around, but I decided against overcomplicating

and I can't find a way to communicate ants which is the chosen palette

@Katenkyo They would only know which palette to use based on the colours they are extending

@trichoplax That's just evil ;)

2:04 PM

@Katenkyo you need the ant man suit

@Geobits Indeed. I've tried to balance the level of evil to give an interesting challenge. It would have been all too easy to add too much...

@trichoplax so I'll have to use more time putting unnescessary marks to keep them in sight, can be safer too, so why not

I also considered coprime width and height, so that diagonal movement would take several loops to hit the starting point again, which could actually be useful for searching

I'm taking a break, see ya

@Katenkyo Thanks for all the input :)

@Geobits do you have a general approach to avoiding edit wars in KotHs? I don't mean editing other people's answers, I mean constantly editing to switch which colours mean what in response to another player doing the same.

2:12 PM

I usually add a line with "play fair, no meta knowledge", but it's hard to judge sometimes. There's not much you can do about it in general IMO, besides making that call on your own. Someone is bound to be upset when you do, though.

@Geobits thinking about your request for a square arena, I'd ideally like the shape of the arena to be of as little relevance as possible (part of why I wanted such a large arena).

@Geobits "Any more of that, and you're ALL disqualified"

Make it unbounded, with smart zoom on the display. Having it wrap at any size means the shape is relevant.

Then the only real way to get back to the queen is by tracking back.

I'd love it to be unbounded - with food only in a finite region so you know for a fact that sending workers off in random directions will result in some of them just being lost forever

I just think that's a bit ambitious for my first attempt :)

Would smart zoom mean it zooms out as the ants spread out? Or tracks a given player?

Well, it doesn't have to be really unbounded. It only has to extend 10k (# turns) in each direction past the furthest starting location.

@Geobits Good point...

2:16 PM

@trichoplax Either could work. Maybe a toggle for that.

My current approach to zooming is to have an arena twice as wide as it is tall, and hovering anywhere in one half will result in a zoomed display obscuring the other half (the zoomed display switches sides to keep out of the way of your mouse pointer)

Oh that could still work for a larger arena then :)

I'm trying to keep it simple enough to be realistic I will complete it, and short enough to fit into a stack snippet (which already might have to be hosted in a separate meta question :( )

@Geobits You mean it could work for a pseudo unbounded arena?

Since the turn count is pretty limited, it should. If you were doing something 5 oom different it probably wouldn't work so well.

Just have a large overview, and something like an inset view of wherever the mouse is pointing.

I'm only currently considering fitting 4 arena cells (2 by 2) per pixel, to squeeze a 2000 by 1000 arena into a 1000 by 500 canvas

2:23 PM

Alternatively, just let the mouse wheel zoom in/out on the main view.

I'm very tempted by this larger arena but one thing that worries me is that starting with just a queen she may walk the wrong way and never find any food

Although strategies to avoid that wouldn't be too difficult

I'm trying to think how much of a problem wrapping is. Even in an unbounded arena I can still slice the food area in half by extending a path in two opposite directions at once. Slightly slower but it still creates a straight path right across the area. So maybe it's not worth trying to prevent that

True. Was just a thought, and I don't think it'll really matter that much either way.

2:40 PM

Thanks for talking through the concept - it might be useful for something else. I think I'll focus on getting this one done as a simple wrapping arena to ensure it doesn't stay vaporware...

I think Geobits' idea to let the user scroll in/out as he want to could be a nice tool. While testing, you might want to see precisely what's happening around your queen/ants to see if they do what you told them to

All of @Geobits' ideas are gold.

6

And I think he starred you for saying that

@trichoplax Oh you.

user image

Not my star. I can add to it if you'd like.

2:45 PM

@Katenkyo Once I have my current zoom idea working (just as a test without the controller), I'll include it as a jsfiddle in the sandbox post so you can see if it's suitable

@Katenkyo No that was me...

@AlexA. lol

The zoom will be to about 4 by 4 pixels per arena cell, with a cell colour view and an ants and food only view

@trichoplax sounds great

@Katenkyo What I definitely want is the option to run a game with only the test entry, so you can see how it does with no competitors (which will also allow it to run much faster...)

@trichoplax oh... Well, i was wrong so

@trichoplax At first, it might be the solution to get started

If people then want to test against a particular single opponent I may consider adding that as an option

@trichoplax How you were meaning running our bot against only the test entry !

So there's no problem, I think it's the fairest way

(sorry, I'm kinda tired)

2:55 PM

@Katenkyo No problem :) I mean start the arena with 2 queens - one the test entry and one an existing answer of your choice

In an official game all answers will play at once. If there are 12 answers there will be 12 queens in the same arena at the start

@trichoplax Wow, it would be fun to see !

Maybe I need to make that clearer in the spec. It's one big game with everyone in it (that's the reason for the arena being so large)

It does mean I will need a very short time limit since each ant will have that time limit and each queen could produce many ants

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Jun '1517

The Nineteenth Byte

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