Are early PythJamScript answers on questions really that bad that people might not want to answer in their less golfy language?
I guess being a J golfer, I'm just as bad, but usually even J is pretty outclassed by these languages. The fun isn't in being the best, but the best in your language.
(Spurred by comments on a recent question's early GS answer.)
early winning(ish) answers definitely dissuade future answers
that applies even in one-language contests
but far more so in contests that allow multiple languages
I don't know pyth or cjam or golfscript or J. Most of my golf experience has been in environments where a) perl was the golfiest language and b) [almost] all participants knew perl
codegolf.com, when it was alive, scored each language separately for every challenge
You could take the "it's pointless if <golflang> does it better" viewpoint even further, though, and just never bother golfing anything because <golflang> already exists and will win every time over <mylang> in a no-hold-barred cage match.
The judge-each-language-separate thing is the right way of going about it.
one idea: a bot that makes a leaderboard automatically based on self-scores at the top of posts
we'd need to standardize how to report your own score
for the codebots challenges I made a python script that fetched the biggest code block from each post and saved it with the name of the first h1 in the post
I'm thinking of posting a code-challenge involving organic nomenclature.
Conversion between SMILES and InChI would be interesting for a code-golf. However, I think the specialized nature of the challenge would make it very... niche?
And drawing a molecule given a text representation, without using libs that do it for you automagically, would be fun too.
The IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI /ˈɪntʃiː/ IN-chee or /ˈɪŋkiː/ ING-kee) is a textual identifier for chemical substances, designed to provide a standard and human-readable way to encode molecular information and to facilitate the search for such information in databases and on the web. Initially developed by IUPAC and NIST during 2000–2005, the format and algorithms are non-proprietary. The continuing development of the standard has been supported since 2010 by the not-for-profit InChI Trust, of which IUPAC is a member. The current version is 1.04 and was released in September...
The simplified molecular-input line-entry system (SMILES) is a specification in form of a line notation for describing the structure of chemical molecules using short ASCII strings. SMILES strings can be imported by most molecule editors for conversion back into two-dimensional drawings or three-dimensional models of the molecules.
The original SMILES specification was initiated by the author David Weininger at the USEPA Mid-Continent Ecology Division Laboratory in Duluth in the 1980s. Acknowledged for their parts in the early development were "Gilman Veith and Rose Russo (USEPA) and Albert Leo...
@PeterTaylor I explicitly mentioned the alignment of the hardware in the specifications (link). Apart from that, USB lava lamps are fine in my opinion.
@algorithmshark Ideally, it shouldn't be a problem, because yes, winning overall isn't the point. There are many people who view that differently though, and it does spoil the fun for them (which, you could say, is "their fault", but I'm sure the OP would still like their submissions if they'd otherwise write them)
Find the Molecule
code-challenge
Introduction
Finding a molecule from a formula is like completing a jigsaw puzzle without the picture: it takes a long time for a human to do it but a computer can do it quicker.
What you have to do is, given a chemical formula, output the molecular structure ...
@MartinBüttner did you see my GetBots.py for the codebots challenge? something like that could use the api to go through all active opted-in challenges and update their leaderboards
eventually such a thing could even download the code, run it, score it, etc
@PhiNotPi but you need to assume a set of statements which have constant cost
normally this is done by assuming you can read and write a single word of memory in constant time and you are allowed to perform any simply mathematical operation of a word of memory in constant time
this set is either defined very formally or simply by saying "whatever C has"
you can then either give the exact cost in terms of these operations, or even better, the exact asymptotic cost as the input size tends to infinity
in golfers vs bowlers, would I be off the mark to guess that the ridiculously long solutions involve a longer program that's been encoded into something like a unary number?
sure why not... although I think the plotting one could become a duplicate of the other one, so you might just be altruistic and help beta decay improve his with your ideas ;)