The Nineteenth Byte

mınxomaτ

12:04 AM

@Downgoat Yeah, but that has a "return" expression and therefore is just a function.

This would be a body: -> (a, b) { a += c; a + b }

Downgoat

@mınxomaτ got it.

Should I allow spaces around decimals? e.g. 12. 34, 12 .34, 12 . 34?

mınxomaτ

I'm pretty sure that would break other things.

Nathan Merrill

@Sparr how did ToD deal with players that joined midgame?

aka, the fundamental problem is that player A would be growing his empire for X weeks and then when player B joins, either he is stomped by player A, or he gets bonuses to compensate (which are notoriously hard to balance)

most servers only support a limited number of languages, right?

Mars Ultor

@mınxomaτ How?

Also

wait

-> should be for Actions (don't return) and => for functions (implicit return)

Also, someone should make a Cheddar chat

Sparr

12:24 AM

@NathanMerrill ToD didn't have mid-game joins. 64 players got together and then the game ran. same thing that Triton does now.

hence the sorta-massive description

Downgoat

Cheddar

For discussion of the design and development of the Cheddar pr...

Sparr

games like Atlantis / Eressea / Lorenai / Overlord are open ended and players join mid-game with some frequency. a core part of those games is that the world grows at the edges over time, and traversing the whole map takes a prohibitive amount of time.

a player making all possible speed towards the edge of the map will barely keep abreast of new players joining, and that unit is unlikely to ever return to that player's original territory

I think the last time I saw a world map for eressea it would take the fastest ships (fantasy setting) something like 2 years of real time to cross the map

Nathan Merrill

there's a slight problem with that: the radius growth slows over time

Sparr

no one ever pushed hard enough for that to matter

investing that much effort into getting to the edge of the map would be expensive and disastrous for whatever other plans you might have

very vague recollection: the fastest ships moved 7 hexes per turn. the map was a few hundred hexes wide and tall, and turns ran once a week. the ocean path from side to side was not at all straight.

Nathan Merrill

sure, but say there are 3 players, who start on days 0, 100, and 200

Sparr

12:30 AM

that didn't happen

Nathan Merrill

?

Sparr

at the nadir of the time I was playing, a handful of players were joining every turn/week.

most players didn't play long and gave up, so there were small abandoned towns and villages and such across most of the world to be found

it was likely you would play for a month or two before encountering another player for the first time

that was eressea. lorenai was different. in lorenai you could choose to start in the most populated part of the world, or in a less populated city. in overlord you got the choice of city or village or wilderness, so you might see a dozen other players on your first turn, or a few, or go a dozen turns before finding anyone.

overlord and lorenai had smaller maps than eressea. again vaguely recalling, but I think they might have been closer to 100x100 or even 50x50, but also with slower travel

all of this was via email

I think that if someone made a web/mobile game of this sort, it might be just barely financially viable today.

I'd go back to paying a dollar a week to play a modern version of the old games I loved

PhiNotPi

@trichoplax I think ideally it would be 50-50.

trichoplax

Hard to guess how to set that balance without knowing what strategies will emerge...

PhiNotPi

I don't want the ideal strategy to be "taking everything one turn at a time" but also not "fill up the entire program with random movement, and sit back and watch"

Sparr

12:38 AM

so, aside from the MMORTS concept, back to codebots style KOTHs...

I mentioned earlier a torus world that expands

another option would be to not expand the world, but have bots respawn, and the proportion of bots spawning would go down as more competitors enter

PhiNotPi

So, idea: limit program size to something much smaller, like 8 instructions or so, but include some kind of unconditional jump.

Sparr

every turn, X old bots randomly despawn and X new bots spawn, evenly split between all entrants so far

PhiNotPi

That's actually a pretty nice idea.

Sparr

make X something large like 1000 and the split would stay quite proportional through hundreds of entrants

PhiNotPi

Sorry, I was absent for most of the MMORTS discussion.

Sparr

12:41 AM

you'd probably limit it to N entries per person, to avoid one person continually adding new versions of their bots and filling up the list

Food Chain's "solution" to that problem was to have a relatively small number of possible entrants and not allowing duplicates of a certain subset of entry features. The actual game was to be the first person to come up with the best combination of features for the current game state

(and the game state mostly asymptotically approached a particular equilibrium between certain optimal entries)

I'd be interested to see the despawn/respawn approach applied to codebots 3 (or 2?)

one arena with 5000 bots in it, every hundred(?) ticks you despawn 1000 of the bots at random and replace them with an equal number of copies of every entrant. keep running until the populations stabilize, and that's the "end" condition of the contest.

or it could just keep going, after stability is reached new entrants could be contributed.

Nathan Merrill

I do like the regular despawn idea, but we still need a "core" idea

Sparr

Core Wars KOTH simply ran a 1v1 match between a new entry and every entry already on the top 100, and then put the new bot in the spot for its score and kicked the #100 bot off

or maybe that was the C++ Robots KOTH?

PhiNotPi

@Sparr Are you talking about the Core Wars hosted on PPCG?

Sparr

err, no? Is there one?

Nathan Merrill

yeah, there was one

17

Q: The Nano Core War

This is an adaption of Core War, a programming KOTH dating back to the 20th century. To be more specific, it is using an incredibly simplified instruction set primarily based off of the original proposal. Background In Core War, there are two programs battling for control over the computer. Th...

king-of-the-hill

PhiNotPi

12:47 AM

Well, it was kinda a stretch from official core wars. I assumed you were talking about "the real thing" but wasn't sure.

Sparr

oh, cool. I wasn't describing that one.

although the way that one is scored, it could definitely run forever

Nathan Merrill

that does beg a question:

do challenges on codegolf need to be terminal?

I mean, if there is a forever-running KoTH, then we'd intentionally plan on never selecting a winner

quartata

Answer chaining challenges don't end.

Sparr

some of them will, eventually

like the "fewer characters every time" one

PhiNotPi

I think, there just has to be a way to pick the current winner at any given moment.

Sparr

12:53 AM

that one is only ever going to have 96(?) answers, at most

and yeah, knowing the current leaderboard works for me. I don't need there to be a winner.

Nathan Merrill

I agree

hmmm,I need a server with lots of processing power, but don't need lots of bandwidth

Zach Gates

What's the proper Stack Exchange site to ask about a colloquialism for something?

trichoplax

ELU?

LegionMammal978

^

Zach Gates

That's what I was thinking but I wasn't sure if that was the place to talk about colloquialisms. Considering not all ELU users are from the USA

LegionMammal978

1:06 AM

colliquialisms tag?

Zach Gates

Well.. that would do it for me ;)

Thanks!

PhiNotPi

Java noob question: I have a game map implemented as a 2D array. There can be either empty space, a robot, or a crystal in each spot (no overlap allowed). What's the proper way of organizing my code? Make an interface/superclass to hold crystals and robots? But... that feels hacky, because crystals don't store information (they simply exist).

Doorknob

In Rust that would be the perfect use case for an enum Square { Empty, Robot { foo: i32, bar: String }, Crystal } :)

Downgoat

@Doorknob what is i32?

Zach Gates

32-bit integer?

Doorknob

1:11 AM

32-bit int, yeah (just an example)

Mars Ultor

@PhiNotPi You need an interface for all methods supported by those

If no methods, just make an IItem interface or something

El'endia Starman

@PhiNotPi I don't know Java, but here's an idea: do an array of ints, where 0 is empty, 1 is crystal, and all other spots are pointers/id numbers of bots.

Easterly Irk

-49

Q: Offering actual money as a bounty?

I have an idea for dealing with a question you badly want to be answered, which no one will answer, even after you've offered a large bounty: cash. Users can offer cash, and whoever has the accepted answer can be paid, possibly via PayPal. Does this sound like a good idea?

feature-request status-declined bounty money-making

-49. Woah.

Mars Ultor

@El'endiaStarman No, Java has enums

Enums > JS int hacks

Nathan Merrill

@PhiNotPi Have a Location object, which exists at a specific location. Also, you should use a Hashmap instead of a 2D array. it still has O(1) read access, is more space efficient, and allows for easy expansion of the world

then, each location has a boolean that indicates whether it has a crystal or not

PhiNotPi

1:19 AM

@NathanMerrill I'm not doing an expanding world, though. This is just a code-bots-style world that's created at the start of the round.

Nathan Merrill

its still more space efficient

if you have a 1000x1000 grid, you'd have to have 1 million "spots" stored in memory

PhiNotPi

How slow is it? (what's the constant hidden in the O(1)?)

Nathan Merrill

I've never had any problems with slowness on hashmaps

PhiNotPi

okay

Nathan Merrill

your other option is to have a generic "MapItem" object

Crystal would extend it

you could even only create 1 crystal, and put it in 1000 different locations

that way, you aren't using up memory for 1000 empty objects

@PhiNotPi you should take a look at my framework

it already has a 2D grid that you can use

(its not all-in or anything. Each of the parts are modular)

PhiNotPi

1:25 AM

I don't know how to use it, though.

Also, it doesn't compile because I assume I'm missing something.

Nathan Merrill

hmmm, what does it say you are missing?

You'll want a TilingMap with a Square adjacency set

PhiNotPi

Multiple markers at this line
	- The method map(Function<? super List<Player>,? extends R>) in the type
	 Stream<List<Player>> is not applicable for the arguments (GameManager)
	- Syntax error on tokens, delete these tokens

^ errors like this (from eclipse)

from line 82 in gamemanager

Nathan Merrill

are you on Java 8?

PhiNotPi

Yeah, I've tried to hook up jdk1.8.0_77

Nathan Merrill

hmmm, I'm on 1.8.0_65

oh, better question, what is your code?

PhiNotPi

1:31 AM

Maybe here's a clue, I'm getting a syntax error on this::runGame

@NathanMerrill I haven't hooked up any of my code to the KOTHcomm.

Nathan Merrill

@PhiNotPi is every :: throwing a syntax error?

for example, there's another one at the bottom of the same file

PhiNotPi

actually, yes

Nathan Merrill

I know your JDK is 1.8, but what is your project language level?

(you'll find that in your project settings)

PhiNotPi

I don't see anything named language level. Where do I find it?

Nathan Merrill

ah, apparently eclipse names it source level:

2

Q: eclipse set source level

I have a project that I built for jdk 7, but I want to expand its compatibility for jdk 6 users as well. I have set the compiler compilance level to 1.6, but the project compiles normally, and fails running on a 1.6 jre due to the fact that the method revalidate was not added to java until java 7...

java eclipse

wherever you select your JDK, there should be another dropdown that allows you to select language level (its probably set to Java 6 or something)

PhiNotPi

1:45 AM

I honestly don't see any support for Java 8 anywhere.

Okay, I think I need to update Eclipse....

quartata

I just found a super old Pyth answer: codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/32759/45151

Look how cute it is rofl

Nathan Merrill

yeah, you need to be on at least Luna

isaacg

2:05 AM

Aww, it's a cute little Pyth 1.0.2

Doorknob

U was uppercase?!

Ok wow this is so unrecognizable as Pyth :P

isaacg

@Doorknob U hasn't changed ...

It's still unary range.

; was e.

V was _

Doorknob

> =ZUw: Convert input to uppercase and store in Z.

Downgoat

since when are we treating esolangs as babies? :P

isaacg

@Doorknob Oh, wow, you're right. That's so different I didn't even realise what I was saying

Doorknob

2:13 AM

haha

GamrCorps

Can some people please take a look at my sandbox post? I want to post it tonight but have had no feedback yet.

Nathan Merrill

@GamrCorps is validation of numbers required?

aka, does the program need to do anything if 1a + 7i is passed?

GamrCorps

@NathanMerrill Numbers can be assumed to be valid, and only valid inputs will be passed. Will add, thanks

Nathan Merrill

also, you said simplifying numbers is allowed, but can I take 3 as input, and return 3.0?

GamrCorps

@NathanMerrill Yeah, added that as well

trichoplax

2:24 AM

@GamrCorps Your third bullet point seems contradictory

GamrCorps

@trichoplax Well then, let me rewrite than. Didnt notice that :P

trichoplax

:)

@GamrCorps Might be worth some zero test cases

GamrCorps

very good point

trichoplax

0
0j+0k
-0j

I assume there will only ever be a maximum of one instance of a given letter? You won't ever have to deal with j-j?

GamrCorps

nope

Nathan Merrill

2:41 AM

bah, I hate writing serializers

Easterly Irk

When you bring in your laundry and get told your one basket is 3 loads. >.<

Geobits

Solution: Wash your own clothes.

Easterly Irk

ಠ_ಠ

Solution: Mail to @Minibits along with $20 for him to wash.

El'endia Starman

Invaluable skill in college and later in life: washing clothes yourself.

2

Easterly Irk

ಠ_ಠ

Geobits

2:51 AM

@EasterlyIrk Actually, yea, that would work. Send along your return address.

trichoplax

$20 + sale price of second hand clothes

Helka Homba

@El'endiaStarman by hand?

Easterly Irk

@trichoplax ಠ_ಠ

@HelkaHomba yeah

El'endia Starman

Well, no. Just doing the work yourself of putting the clothes in the washer and dryer...

Easterly Irk

@Geobits Wait, am I getting these back??.........

And intact?

Geobits

2:57 AM

@trichoplax I hadn't thought of that, but that's even better. @Easter Don't bother with the return address.

Easterly Irk

Without downvote icons silk screened on?

@Geobits D:

Will send and sue.

Geobits

Yea, we'll see how well suing a nine-year-old works out for you.

trichoplax

I'm not sure $20 + sale price of second hand clothes is going to be enough to buy Geobits' home address, unless it's a big load of washing

Geobits

"I sent all my clothes to some guy on the internet and he hasn't sent them back. Please award me all the things."

@trichoplax PO Box for life

trichoplax

ah...

Downgoat

3:03 AM

I leave for 30 minutes and come back to sending clothes and money to Minibits to wash them...

Easterly Irk

@Geobits ಠ_ಠ

Geobits

If you wait a day, I can ask him tomorrow if he'll accept Visa, MC, or maybe even bitcoins (who knows?). He's in bed now though, so it'll have to wait.

Easterly Irk

@Downgoat sowee

@Geobits okai

Downgoat

@EasterlyIrk ? Oh

Geobits

He's probably gonna want that cash, though.

Easterly Irk

3:06 AM

BTW, does minibits have an obsession with small animals?

my 9 yr old brother does.

14 mins ago, by Easterly Irk

Solution: Mail to @Minibits along with $20 for him to wash.

PhiNotPi

@NathanMerrill If you are still around, I updated Eclipse.

Geobits

@EasterlyIrk Not unless you include pokemon.

Easterly Irk

okai

Nathan Merrill

@PhiNotPi here :)

PhiNotPi

do you have any documentation anywhere about how I use it?

Nathan Merrill

3:07 AM

nope, sorry

that's still on the todo

I can explain the Maps if you'd like

Helka Homba

@Geobits Does Wifeobits approve of you encouraging child labor?

Geobits

@HelkaHomba There is no Wifeobits ;)

Besides, think of it as, umm, chores, for umm, allowance.

PhiNotPi

I'm getting some new errors:

Access restriction: The type 'Pair<K,V>' is not API (restriction on required library '/home/mclapp/Downloads/jdk1.8.0_77/jre/lib/ext/jfxrt.jar')

Nathan Merrill

oooh, that may be my fault

where is that at?

PhiNotPi

TupleSerializer

I also need to figure out how to fix import org.jetbrains.annotations.NotNull;

Nathan Merrill

3:14 AM

bah. I'll remove those too

I used to use Kotlin in the project, but removed it to make it easier for developers

and Pair was a Kotlin thing

PhiNotPi

Also, in utils.iterables, Tools has an empty geometricMean() method

Nathan Merrill

?

my bad

PhiNotPi

(The geometric mean probably isn't the most important thing.)

GamrCorps

I looked into Kotlin a while ago but never got into it, is it good?

Nathan Merrill

@GamrCorps I like it alot

@PhiNotPi I'm pushing an update right now

I actually removed the mean a while back

New Main Posts

3:18 AM

0

Q: Parse a Quaternion

If you don't know already, a quaternion is basically a 4-part number. For the purposes of this challenge, it has a real component and three imaginary components. The imaginary components are represented by the suffix i, j, k. For example, 1-2i+3j-4k is a quaternion with 1 being the real component...

It's alive!

ok, take a look?

Finally no errors, that was a struggle.

Nathan Merrill

sorry :)

PhiNotPi

Okay, so, how would I go about basing my bots KOTH off of this?

Nathan Merrill

3:22 AM

well, like I said, its pretty modular

the best part is the maps

so, start with that

create a TilingMap

with a SquareAdjacencySet

PhiNotPi

p.s. I am impressed by the scope of this project

Nathan Merrill

thanks :)

Tiling map is your standard map, but can be extended to include triangle tilings, hexagonal, and so forth.

GamrCorps

Well thats the fastest Ive ever gotten rep

Doorknob

:D

Nathan Merrill

You have a ShapedGridMap, which basically a fixed shape. Think of a hexagon made up of N other hexagons

and finally, a GraphMap, which is just a graph

GamrCorps

3:27 AM

Hey @Doorknob, don't you know Lojban fairly well?

Doorknob

go'i

GamrCorps

Ill take that as yes. Would you suggest learning that Lojban?

PhiNotPi

@NathanMerrill How would I go about using stuff such as Tournaments, Game, Player, etc.?

Doorknob

@GamrCorps It's certainly interesting. I guess it depends; it's not for everybody :P But I do enjoy it

Nathan Merrill

@PhiNotPi Game represents a single round of a game

Helka Homba

3:30 AM

@GamrCorps Good Job!

Jester Tran

anyone here know about jane street?

GamrCorps

@HelkaHomba hahahah

I saw that edit

quartata

What's a good resource for learning Lojban?

Nathan Merrill

@PhiNotPi I just realized I need to change how Players work (because I need to instantiate a new set of them every game)

but a player represents a player within a game

GamrCorps

@quartata mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban#Learning_Lojban is what Im looking at now

Doorknob

3:32 AM

@quartata Level 0, CLL, IRC #lojban

Nathan Merrill

So, that said, you need a GameManager. A game manager is basically the "meta" for a game. It lets a tournament know how many players a game supports, and how to create a game

Doorknob

@Doorknob tasmi lo nu mi cilre

Nathan Merrill

therefore, select a tournament type, give it a game manager, and the set of current players (and any other parameters it wants)

then you can call run() as many times as you'd like, and it'll run a tournament for you

Doorknob

@quartata Oh, also, Memrise and Anki are both good for flashcards

Nathan Merrill

SamplingTournament is the typical tournament you see on this site: Select N random players, and put them all in a game.

oh, one last thing: Scoreboard is your aggregator.

Geobits

3:36 AM

@quartata Find a daycare filled with kids just under a year old. Listen as they attempt to communicate, and take notes.

Nathan Merrill

so, you can run multiple trials of a game with sampling tournament, and then rank the players with the lowest high score if you wanted to :P

GamrCorps

@NathanMerrill I missed out on this conversation earlier, is this a KOTH controller?

Nathan Merrill

yes

zyabin101

Hello

PhiNotPi

The one KOTH controller to rule them all.

Chris Jester-Young

3:40 AM

@JesterTran It's very well-known in the functional programming crowd, because they mostly run on OCaml.

@NewMainPosts Ooh, I must try this.

PhiNotPi

So, let's say that I want to implement as much of my KOTH as possible with this controller...

So, I'm making a new class with a main method, and the first thing I should do is to make a "tournament"? Let's say that I decide to do a MAM tournament (since this will be a everyone-at-once game).

It looks like I need to make a List<Player> and a Function<List<Player>, Game> first.

Nathan Merrill

List<Player> is every player in the game

er...have you pulled?

you need to pull

because Function should be replaced with a GameManager

PhiNotPi

In MamTournament?

Nathan Merrill

that said, GameManager does require a Function<List<Player>, Game>

yes

oh, nevermind

GamrCorps

@NathanMerrill where is this repository?

Nathan Merrill

3:48 AM

I didn't update it

my bad

PhiNotPi

It looks like the other tournaments do require a GameManager

@GamrCorps github.com/nathanmerrill/KoTHComm

GamrCorps

Thanks

Nathan Merrill

I did gamemanager to allow for multiple games to run at once

but I apparently missed MamTournament

anyways, its my bedtime

I'll update the code tomorrow :)

PhiNotPi

Okay, bye!

Nathan Merrill

bye!

GamrCorps

3:50 AM

goodnight!

mınxomaτ

4:14 AM

UK company tax work is so much easier than in Germany...

zyabin101

4:28 AM

@MarsUltor @Downgoat and other GitHub users: Now you can keep pro-forma review comments to issues and pull requests without any extension.

To start, goto github.com/settings/replies.

Downgoat

@zyabin101 "ಠ_ಠ" is going to be my first one...

xnor

It's such a joy to be outgolfed on things I worked hard on. Give some love to proud haskeller's Interleaving golf and quintopia's ABACABA Cities golf!

Let's give later-posted solutions a well-deserved boost.

zyabin101

@Downgoat Now select a short title for your reply. "Disapproval"?

Downgoat

@zyabin101 just ಠ_ಠ will do