@rusher pinging you

By black box with no API, I was referring to the Maker

No information given on how to communicate with it

Are we sending strings across STDIN and STDOUT?

Is he going to leave us a nugget in a file somewhere?

Will he leave our process running for the entire game, or call us once, close us, call us again, etc?

How I saw this challenge is that there is no user interaction.

There isn't. It's two programs communicating

How do they communicate?

We get to play 100 games. Will our program be able to run for all 100 games, or will he restart our bot between games?

How will the number be given? Through STDIN?

Will be reply through STDIN I mean?

Do we need to write our guess to a file?

Well for delphi it would work like this

I don't care how you would implement it in your language. All that matters is how HE implements it.

Then the solver could just make a call to that function

oops, makes should be maker

So you wrote a function that has to be called in delphi?

Is his black box going to call your delphi function?

Why did you assume that he will pass it in as a parameter rather than through STDIN?

There is no blackbox. He didnt make a program for it, you have to write both a maker and solver

No you don't. You make the solver. You have no idea what the maker is made of.

It even says "The Solver does not know the percentages that the Maker has chosen for his replies. "

And that assumption is based on what?

If you made the maker, then you would know what percentage was chosen.

Since you don't know, then you must not have made the maker.

The challenge is also called "Quickest 'Solver' for the Hot or Cold Game."

Says nothing about the maker

And when the author was questioned about it, the author just replied "getting colder"

He obviously doesn't care to clarify, and so I don't see the point of asking again.

Fair enough, point taken. The way I saw it is that you know what the percentages were but the solver could not use those values.

Lets say if you get in a 15% range you will get the message "Really warm" and a range of 5% "really hot" the solver cant move on based on the knowledge that he is only 5% or 15% off

Then the author needs to say that. As it stands, nobody else seems to understand. I thought you had to write only a solver. You thought you didn't. Two others are also unsure.

None of us want to suggest an edit because the challenge has other problems that aren't necessarily close reasons. You are welcome to suggest them.

No time for it now, almost heading home so ye :/

But I might try reposting this later, just make it more clear on what to do because I do believe its a fun challenge. At least what I have in mind

Teun Pronk, the reason I went to Meta about your question was because the concept was worth saving (And because I had a decent answer.) The concept of the other question I mentioned in my meta post was also good (though the OP was looking for something that was just too trivial.) Both those questions were better than this latest one.

This question has no API defined, the game can be optimised by a very trivial algorithm, the bonuses are all over the place, and (worst of all) the OP just doesn't want to listen.

So thank you for your question, which I went to some effort to save, but the same arguments don't apply to this one.

I'm still at work, I will check back later. Bye.