@PhiNotPi not all bots start out facing the same direction in Code Bots
also, I ran a full pass of the code bots controller with a 1/4-as-dense map. the outcome didn't change much.
less density gives bots one or two extra turns to set up blocking/defense (good), and makes short code for moving around in square paths much less effective (bad?)
Unicode Case Mapping code-golf
Challenge:
Given a string as input, print it in both lowercase and uppercase.
The string will be valid UTF-8, and your output should be as well. Characters without lowercase or uppercase mappings should be printed unmodified. Invalid, un-assigned, and private-use...
@Sparr you really could have finished and posted your work-in-progress for the Horror Movie Search Party chalenge :P ... now my bounty rep goes down the drain
Marbelous 68 66 bytes
}0
--@2
@2/\=0MB
}0@1\/
&0/\>0!!
--
@1
00@0
--/\=0
\\@0&0
Marbelous is an 8 bit language with values only represented by marbles in a Rube Goldberg-like machine, so this wasn't very easy.
This approach is roughly equivalent to the following pseudo-code:
function recursiv...
Oh, I just reached 1k rep and got my first gold badge today, cool
Saved work error code-golf
While looking around the internet, I came across the following error message displayed by an Amiga TOS:
Your challenge is write a script which throws an error after more than two hours of keyboard entry with no disk entry. As this is code golf, the shortest program ...
Okay, if I understand Geobits's code correctly, his helper function either sums all the prime factors of n (for the first and third input) or it sums all but the largest prime factor and adds 1 (for the second input). then he does: integer square root twice for first input, times 11 for second input, two times integer square root twice for third input. And then he returns the sum of these three numbers.
ah no wait
for the second input it determines the number of prime factors instead of summing all of them
Find Lines of Symmetry
Some characters are symmetrical to others. For instance:
d is symmetrical vertically to b
W is symmetrical horizontally to M
O is symmetrical both ways to O
! is symmetrical horizontally to i (takes some imagination!)
^ is symmetrical horizontally to v (also takes...
King of the server - virus wars
There is a virtual machine with Linux running various services (SSH server, Apache (with SSL), FTP server, rsync server, etc);
There is tool which checks that the server is running (periodically accessing all its services - trying to view the page from Apache, do...
One major change that was suggested for Code Bots 3 was the addition of "non-executable" lines, or lines that would be skipped unless specifically called for by another line.
For example:
If D #1 #2
\\ Copy #3 *#E
\\ Move
\\ Flag
Next Line
So, one turn will execute If D #1 #2 while the next turn would execute Next Line.
@PhiNotPi I think you should concentrate on conceptual changes that remove freezing from the game. As neat as it is, I think that's a big weakness of codebots(1).
I think integrating Jump and If might not work. For example, If D *#*C #7 allows you to execute an opponent's line, but you can't Jump to an opponent's line.
@MartinBüttner Sounds good; if you want to write it, go ahead. (This is all just stuff copy/pasted from the previous boilerplate, and I've actually been planning to rewrite some of it and add to it more later)
Oh, I also wanted to make the sandbox revisions / comments preservation thingy, so that people who want to keep answers for educational value can be happy too. puts on to-do list
What do you mean by "sandbox revisions / comments preservation thingy"?
I really don't think anyone uses that for educational value. If anything people will follow the currently developed proposals, but I highly doubt that anyone goes through old ones and reads old revisions and comments for that purpose.
That was a terrible description. :P I think I mentioned this on meta once: if there was an automatic process that copies the revision history and comments of finished sandbox posts and hosts them elsewhere, that stuff could still be preserved.
At the very least, if posted challenges do get deleted, I would go back and undelete all the deleted comments because they wouldn't be in the way anymore.
By standard SE practices, comments which have been worked into the proposal should always be deleted anyway as they're not meant to stick around with important information.
Template for Challenge Proposals
Every proposal should contain several fixed pieces of information, including a title, the tags you intend to use and body of the challenge as you intend to post it on main. For a more uniform look of the sandbox (and easier orientation of reviewers), it is recomm...
Roulette
king-of-the-hill
Roulette is one of the simplest casino games to understand, so I invite you all to pit your bots against each other to see who gets the most money.
Coding
You will be supplied with a singe argument via the command line. This argument will be the amount of money you h...
I'm considering adding an option to the controller which lets you write a protocol of the game to a file (without timing information), such that someone (potentially myself) could write a visualiser which reads in the protocol and renders a replay of the game. People could then use that to include a GIF of the first x rounds of their bot playing in their answers (for whatever x gives interesting result without blowing up the file too much).
@PhiNotPi Dennis cracked my Mathematica answer, so I can tell you know what you missed: negative inputs ;)
Adding negative primes to the list gives 3 additional possible values module 240.
Rule 34 of PPCG: if it exists, it can be worked into a challenge.
@PhiNotPi one idea: pose two problems which both need to be solved. then use either a restriction on or a combined scoring of code size and levenshtein distance between the two solutions.
that is a double code golf in which a few "typos" would change your program from one solution to the other.
it's important to not make it levenshtein distance alone or answers will just be if(0)program1;else program2; and if(1)program1;else program2;. you somehow need to incentivise to reuse as many characters as possible.
the only problem I see is that I still wouldn't want to use code-gofl as a tag, because a) it looks like a typo and is likely to be fixed by eager users and "f" and "l" aren't even that visually distinct, so people might just overlook it all together.
maybe something like typo-golf would be more appropriate, and then you can call the first such challenge something like "Code Gofl: Accidentally golf the wrong problem" (or something more descriptive about the two problems you choose)
if they are too similar it's too boring, it they are too distinct, the levenshtein distance is likely to tend to the code length (although I'm sure some people might surprise you). and they should also be solvable in a similar number of characters
you can probably look for old plain code golfs and reuse two from different fields (string vs numbers) which had similar answer sizes. the twist due to the levenshtein distance should make the challenge sufficiently different not to be a duplicate.