@PeterTaylor Oh yeah, I know what you mean. I've got quite few projects that I never really finished, because the next project came around that seemed more interesting at the time.
@PeterTaylor You can't prove most of physics without learning calculus. However, you can still learn Physics by accepting that what the book says is true.
Why would you do x over y once you jumped back? Because you knew y was a bad idea, so you have to keep that memory or else you'd just end up doing y again.
@m.buettner You have to come up with something original. It's a popularity contest with Geobits, Peter Taylor, @ProgrammerDan, and CJY as the judges. If we don't think it's original it doesn't count.
Unstable loop: after they accidentally knock the JFK assassin and spoil his aim, they have to persuade JFK himself to go back and shoot from the grassy knoll.
@Geobits Variable. Watch the first two episodes: if you think they're ok, then it gets better. If you think they're utter crap, you won't want to keep watching.
Alternatively, buy the books. They're not entirely consistent with the TV series, but they're good relatively standalone reads.
@m.buettner Stable time loops are necessarily paradoxical: there's a cause and a later effect, but the effect then leads (via time travel) to the cause.
@Rusher No. At any instant in time, there are no more than two of him.
I mean the first baby is half Lister half Mother (HLHM). When he fathers himself, the new baby is Half HLHM, Half Mother (which is now 1/4 Lister, 3/4 Mother).
So actually it's the opposite of what I said lol.
The baby after that is 7/8 Mom 1/8 Lister
Eventually the gene pool converges to mom and Lister goes away
On a completely unrelated note: OP has now deleted codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/32027 . Although it had problems, the underlying task (planar graph drawing) is an interesting one, and hasn't been asked before.
@Rusher That assumes random gene selection, but because we know it's a loop, the half of Lister's genes which are contributed are always the same. The paradoxical thing is: where did they come from in the first place?
hmm, got this idea for a king-of-the-hill... a multiplayer game of life in a finite grid where the winner is the last one alive, considering living cells belong to the player that created them and death to life transition inherits the parent if possible...
It's Life, Jim, but not as we know it
You probably know Conway's Game of Life, the famous cellular automaton invented by mathematician John Conway. Life is a set of rules that, together, allow you to simulate a two-dimensional board of cells. The rules decide which cells on the board live and w...
So after it stabilizes and every cell is a hybrid of all players, numNewChildrenPerIteration * (numPlayers * numAvgParentsPerChild) * numIterationsRemaining
I think what you should definitely do differently than in his proposal is make enemy cells kill your own (I think you intended that anyway, if you were going for "be the last one left"). Otherwise this just amounts to plastering the grid with the most densely packed stable shape you can think of.
I've been wanting to see a scoreboard based on kills rather than survival for a KOTH challenge. I think this is a perfect opportunity (instead of "most cells alive at the end")
Otherwise the community will generate yet another set of CowardlyBots
That's why I made mine with hunger (you have to eat to live, can't just sit still or run). It still ended with survival, but there was nothing cowardly about them.
The count of delete votes needed to delete a post is not always correct. The "delete" tab in the tools said that a question needed 2 votes, but the tooltip of the "delete" link said this:
And after voting to delete it, it wasn't deleted, now it says that it needs one more delete vote. This app...
I think ProgramFOX misread how many votes were left. Or he found a bug and the system doesn't know how to count. Or he pressed the back button and got a cached page and tried to vote again. Among those, the bug option is probably the least viable given the popularity of Stack Exchange as a whole
Wow some delivery drivers are just dumb. The same guy delivers the same order to the same building on the same day of the last three weeks. Delivery instructions say "Call before entering." He ignores that every time, and forgets to bring a receipt so that I can give him a tip. I don't have any cash, so he is just out of luck today.
If I were to pass your program an integer array as input, what format would you prefer?
I understand that this question is primarily opinion-based, but it is also incredibly useful information for those of us who want to write challenges that appeal to the largest number of people.
If I were to pass your program an integer array as input, what format would you prefer?
I understand that this question is primarily opinion-based, but it is also incredibly useful information for those of us who want to write challenges that appeal to the largest number of people.
Re: Your complaint is that I assumed a particular dimension (a fair guess given the several other answers using a 3x3 as an example) when you said nothing about the particular dimension.
Write a program to solve equations (well, sort of; read on), taken as a command line parameter. Whitespaces are irrelevant between operators and numbers, e.g. 1+2 and 1\t + 2 (where \t is a tab) are both fine. There can be any number of variables, but they will always be one lower-case letter. Yo...
I thought JSON would do better. CSV is not actually a universal language. A .csv saved in notepad on a Windows machine has extra characters in it that break on a Mac. JSON isn't prone to the newline problem
But they'll open on their respective platforms just fine, even with the mess that notepad makes.
@Rusher That's because you're looking at the file format. If by CSV you actually just mean comma/newline separated values, it's the same everywhere. Unless your koth is saving it as a file and reading it in a text editor, it shouldn't matter.
JSON is fine if a) your language expects it or b) you have a native library that's simple to use without taking too many characters. When you posted your question, I thought you meant across the spectrum of challenges, including code-golf.
For a KotH or code-challenge, I honestly couldn't care less what format you use as long as it's not ambiguous.
@m.buettner That doesn't really take into account all the posts I want to down vote lol. I also wouldn't down vote, but just wouldn't vote entirely on the csv one.
catch(Exception e) {HTMLWriter.postTo("codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/12345",findPostContainingTitle(className),"You fucked up the program.");}
If someone finds a way to, given a post number and a title (like "#CamoWolf"), post a comment on an answer with that title that says "You #$%^ed up the program!" in Java I'll use it. Seems hard at the moment.
I just Googled and was immediately horrified at the amount of code I was seeing.
Some people really know how to make Java horrifying. I don't even get how.
Sadly I don't know enough windows shell scripting to actually test that theory
I know enough to stumble around powershell and thats it
And I can pretty much Google how to write batch files for whatever it is I need to do.
On the other hand, I received a formal education in Bash shell scripting, and could probably tell you two commands off the top of my head. I couldn't write a for loop using that awful syntax to save my life. Forgot everything the moment I took the final for that class.
We must be discussing primary and secondary school learning, or a college that was nothing like the one I graduated from.
I'm pretty much in love with how my college handled it. Freshman: Learn tools Sophomore: Learn complicated tools Junior: Apply tools Senior: Solve real problems with tools, get judged by a real company, and if they don't like the job you did you don't graduate
Most of my experience is geared toward primary/secondary, yes (both as student and parent), but you saying you brain-dumped everything after taking the final seems to say it's at least partially applicable...
@Rusher I started reading Dilbert in 2005 :D ... to be fair, most of the time it's rather mediocre, but every now and then there are absolute gems in there ^^
@Quincunx Unfortunately, it's much easier if you know both her name and the obvious message. It's basically a cryptogram after only a couple letters are revealed.
The count of delete votes needed to delete a post is not always correct. The "delete" tab in the tools said that a question needed 2 votes, but the tooltip of the "delete" link said this:
And after voting to delete it, it wasn't deleted, now it says that it needs one more delete vote. This app...
If I were to pass your program an integer array as input, what format would you prefer?
I understand that this question is primarily opinion-based, but it is also incredibly useful information for those of us who want to write challenges that appeal to the largest number of people.
