Choose the Smallest Unchosen king-of-the-hill
Upon seeing the Keep your distance! challenge, I was reminded of similar party game involving numbers.
Every round, each player chooses a single positive integer. The winner of that round is the player who chose the smallest integer nobody else chos...
@Optimizer I think the -9 are mostly for the other points, that tips don't belong on the site at all. that's why I added the new answer which specifically addresses the CW thing. if someone disagrees with that, I think they should explicitly add an answer that says "Tips should be CW" (and just that)
@MartinBüttner I think that since a spell must be cast if you complete a sequence, that person casts a spell. But since you control only one hand, I assume that the controlled mage has the ability to choose which spell.
@Sp3000 I remembered that question and then read through the list of KotH to find it.
@PeterTaylor makes sense. if you don't mind another question... the rules state that you can target a creature that is about to be cast (using the example of an elemental). with the other creatures, of course, you don't know which creature is being cast, since the spells are all suffixes of one another. can you just say "the creature you're about to cast" or do you have to name a specific one and hope that's the one the opponent chooses?
I think that needs an implementer's ruling. "The creature you're about to cast" sounds reasonable to me.
@Geobits FWIW I asked those questions because I thought of them, but I haven't upvoted the question as ready to post because I still haven't fully understood it.
Understandable. I'm going to post example submissions (a CW non-competing one and a semi-serious one) along with the challenge, so that should help. Not that it's ideal to rely on that to explain things, but it's hard for me to look at the spec with fresh eyes. If you see anything else, just let me know.
@PhiNotPi More information needed. Sounds interesting.
an effect IMO
Since no attack really has more than one.
I love this question: Why don't airlines load their passengers like freight? All other issues aside, people object to being treated like cargo (worse than they already are). Plummeting ticket sales are a good disincentive...
I mean, if it lasts until the end of battle you don't need to cover it
@Geobits If you start a Codemon at 100 attack, and you subsequently fight for 100 rounds and you spend your bonus points on attack, would you have 200 attack?
Real-Time Hovercraft Battle
king-of-the-hill
Hovercrafts are cool. Hovercrafts with rail guns are even cooler. In this challenge, you will write a program to controller a battling hovercraft.
The hovercrafts in this game obey the laws of physics. A hovercraft with no acceleration will conti...
Geez. My manager is trying to account for the 29 hours per developer per three weeks that are unaccounted for.
Talk about squeezing for time. At my last job, 80% accounted for was good
If I have to account for 100% of my time every three weeks, I'll be spending ten minutes per day just double checked that my numbers add up to 8 hours.
Yes. So if I close two bugs at two hours each, and complete one task at two hours, and that is my day, then I have lost two hours.
I could log impediments like "Had to respond to email about an issue the customer was facing. 30 minutes." but where does it end? Should I log an impediment about logging impediments?
@MartinBüttner For the CTF challenge: Do you think it would be better to send players a map that differentiates opposing teams, or just a map that identifies your team and "everyone else" so that every enemy looks identical.
@Rainbolt If you're able to remember state well (I don't know the specifics of the challenge), I like the differentiating option. More strategic options if you know that team A likes to defend and team B is stupid.
I agree with that, but don't see it as a downside. If your goal is to make it more interesting then that will do it. If you're trying to lower the entry barrier, go the other way.
Which turns out to be nice because I can also use it for display
I think I'll make a separate process for the GUI though. Last time I built it into the controller. I think this time I will spit the map out and let someone else decide how to display it.
Should I make people write a separate program for the Flag Holder?
"That's a very difficult question to answer. To do this robust I could have given a training example and kept a secret test example. As I didn't, can we compromise and say you can use hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg38/chromosomes/chr3.fa.gz to hone your code but you shouldn't use anything specific about the data I have given you to test on? Chromosome 3 will be very similar to chromosome 2 so it should work well for optimization. "
that's my best effort
@randomra true! Except random input behaves in boring ways :)
@PhiNotPi I believe there's an old-ish sandbox proposal for a KotH on an ice sheet, which is a bit similar to your hovercraft idea... except there, it was only about pushing, and not about inflicting damage
@feersum in case you are interested.. the full histogram of single characters is {'A': 36905447, 'a': 34885766, 'c': 24191191, 'g': 24289179, 'G': 24161724, 'h': 1, 'C': 24126990, 'N': 1645291, '2': 1, 'T': 36965508, 't': 35022424, 'n': 10, 'r': 1, '>': 1}
the h,r and 2 are just from "chr2"
the lower case n is more of a mystery
@feersum I updated the question to address the discussed we just had
I've fleshed out the Shuffle an Array sandbox proposal to the series of challenges on randomness I had in mind... all sorts of feedback are very welcome:
Random Golf of the Day
code-golfrandom
I intend to run this as a little series of challenges revolving around the topic of randomness - potentially as a 9-hole golf course. In this case, I'd maintain a leaderboard across all challenges in the series, and offer a large bounty to the person co...
@Geobits I want every player in my game to have an id that represents their team. However, I can't wrap my head around how to give them an id that they can't manipulate.
If you create a parameter-less constructor in the parent class, then it will be called by default when the child class is constructed. But I need to create a parameterized constructor and force it to be called. But then I'm writing code for the submissions and that kind of sucks.
@feersum The problem is that I want as many people as possible to actually exist in Java, because the JVM will already be running and that will save processing time. The games slow down to an excruciating crawl when I have to instantiate and communicate with, for example, Python processes.
@Geobits I was gonna do it the same way I did the last one. You can either be called via command line, or you can inherit from the base Player class in Java.
@feersum I have to maintain another two dimensional array just to identify what team each player is on. I can also make it a property of Player and not have to worry about that. But if I make it a property of Player, I can't have anyone messing with that property besides me.
Choose the Smallest Unchosen king-of-the-hill
Upon seeing the Keep your distance! challenge, I was reminded of similar party game involving numbers.
Every round, each player chooses a single positive integer. The winner of that round is the player who chose the smallest integer nobody else chos...
Real-Time Hovercraft Battle
king-of-the-hill
Hovercrafts are cool. Hovercrafts with rail guns are even cooler. In this challenge, you will write a program to controller a battling hovercraft.
The hovercrafts in this game obey the laws of physics. A hovercraft with no acceleration will conti...
Random Golf of the Day
code-golfrandom
I intend to run this as a little series of challenges revolving around the topic of randomness - potentially as a 9-hole golf course. In this case, I'd maintain a leaderboard across all challenges in the series, and offer a large bounty to the person co...
