"Somehow" meaning every image editor that exists? Sure :P

@Geobits oh maybe "convert" will do it...

I am a command line person :)

I don't get all this modern GUI stuff :)

...said while sandboxing a graphical challenge...

no mice involved! :)

it's more the drop down menus that I don't like :)

I don't mind mice

I get that command line is cool and all, but sometimes opening it up in Paint is just easier. Especially if you'd have to look up the right commands to do it otherwise.

@Geobits I am sure you are right.. unless you haven't done it that way before

How big do you want it?

50x50?

@El'endiaStarman I updated it

it is now 64 by 64

using convert g3L3C.png -resize 64x64 test.png

:)

alright

200 by 200 is still quite small

but at least it can move

For the record, it's now 64x48. And has transparent parts (and semi-transparent). How should those be handled?

"The background should be white and the window/screen must be at least 400 pixels by 400 pixels. If your language doesn't support windows/screens that large then use the largest size it does support as long as that is not less than 200 by 200."

@Geobits oh yes... 64 by 48

about the transparent parts, what is the problem with them? This is just so that it doesn't look bad on the background

If you're trying to encourage old languages like BASIC, using a PNG with half-transparent pixels is not optimal.

I don't really know what half-transparent means I have to admit

what color are those?

I assume it is like colored acetate sheets :)

Half transparent would mean that the alpha value is 0.5 or so.

@Lembik Umm, kinda. If you open it up in an image program and zoom in, you should be able to see what I mean.

RGB (red green blue) is a subset of RGBA (red green blue alpha).

Does anyone here know of problems that are easy for a computer to verify correct solutions to, but hard for computers to solve, and that humans could solve faster?

it's supposed to be like captchas?

I imagine something in the visual recognition realm would work.

@trichoplax There are at least two games where humans solved hard problems faster than supercomputers. Folding proteins was one of them.

@feersum yes - computer can't solve it but can easily tell an answer is correct

Or do you mean that computers should be able to verify the answer without knowing it in advance

@feersum The computer should be incapable of finding an answer, but if presented with an answer it should be able to confirm whether it is correct

@trichoplax that is the definition of np-hard

@trichoplax the problem is that you want a human to be able to find an answer quickly?

What I read about the protein folding game was that human teams were somewhat competitive in a competition, but not exactly superior.

Foldit is what I mentioned.

:25052967 That also has a huge space of possible proteins, which sounds promising for generating an endless list of new problems for a proof of work

And only humans that practiced for thousands of hours could try to beat computers.

> A 2010 paper in the science journal Nature credited Foldit's 57,000 players with providing useful results that matched or outperformed algorithmically computed solutions.

it's highly unlikely that there exist problems which are impossible to solve quickly by computer but easy to solve by human unless you mean driving a car :)

Not easy for any human.

@Lembik Not instantly, but I want a team of thousands of people to have a good chance of one of them solving it in about 10 minutes (even if one person alone has much smaller chance).

@Lembik Not golfed :P

@trichoplax I think we can satisfy 2 of your 3 criteria simultanesouly

all three sounds tough :)

@Geobits :)

@Lembik Now where have I heard that before...? :)

@trichoplax actually... I don't know!

I feel I have missed a joke :(

I've heard it from your mom >_>

ah.. a sex joke

I don't usually miss those :)

@El'endiaStarman hm... not really sure what to do about this transparency .. would it make sense to set al the transparent parts to white?

Not a sex joke

@El'endiaStarman and do you know how to do that

@Lembik I think so, yes.

@trichoplax oh.. then I am just confused

Open in MS Paint, save.

@El'endiaStarman I don't have MS anything!

would you be able to do that please

MS Paint can't deal with transparency, so that's a quick way to do it. :P

A simple bitmap would make more sense if you're targeting retro. Not an isometric 3D view at all.

@Lembik Just the Good/Cheap/Fast - pick any two problem

@trichoplax aha

@Geobits The bitmaps of the alien invaders are apparently trademarks.

That doesn't mean he can't use similar ones, though.

yes.. I had to use google images with the option to find images that allowed non-commercial use

right

@trichoplax I heard it about addition, multiplication, and point evaluation of polynomials :P

and actually I quite like the image

I think it looks cool :)

it's just a little transparent :)

The image is nice. It's just not particularly suited for the "old" feel I thought you were shooting for.

hmm.. I could add to the question that the answerer can convert the transparent parts to white if they like

@Geobits traditional values in a modern setting? :)

@feersum I love jokes that go over my head - I'll get it after some reading...

@trichoplax it's a choice between coefficient and point-value representation of polynomials

if that helps

@Lembik I love it even more when it goes over my head but everyone else gets it :)

I didn't really get it, actually... :P

Yay!

Specifically, why it's hard to have all three at once.

:)

ok.. added a comment to the question about transparency

is it all perfect now? :)

You can have any two in O(N).

How does one have multiplication in O(N)?

@feersum Oh, it's about algorithmic complexity, not consistency?

@Geobits yes? :)

I don't remember the exact details of the 3 representations

@El'endiaStarman if they are represented by point-value it is trivial

@feersum 3? I only know 2

@Lembik Simple colors, no semi-transparent pixels.

@El'endiaStarman you just multiply the values at the points you have evaluated the polynomial

How does one represent a polynomial by point-value?

@Geobits oh! thanks

@Geobits is the background white? It doesn't look white somehow

How does that help for calculating values at points you don't know?

@El'endiaStarman just evaluate it at some points

No, but I can do that if you want.

@El'endiaStarman a polynomial of degree n is uniquely specified by its evaluation at n+1 points

@Geobits yes plase

@Geobits it will be on a white background

and it must look beautiful! :)

So, about the cat challenge. Does anyone have suggestions for a better name? It's about as much cat as it is echo since it doesn't take any command-line arguments or read files or anything. I suppose as far as command-line scripts go it's the identity. But at the same time, at least when it comes to showcasing esolangs this is often called cat, so calling it that would be good for searchability...

@Lembik Well, yes. I'm having difficulty understanding why this is useful.

@El'endiaStarman it's useful for multiplying polynomials.. so you start with the normal coefficient representation, convert to point-value representation, multiply quickly, convert back

And you have multiplied the polynomials

And adding is also easy with point values.

@Geobits looks the same to be

@El'endiaStarman now you can ask me how to convert to and from point-value representation quickly :)

Calculating values at arbirtary points is the hard thing with that representation.

@Lembik The first was transparent, this one's white. It will look roughly the same on a white background ;)

@Geobits oh. no.. slightly different

:)

@feersum I finally figured that out.

It makes sense now.

@Geobits added! thanks

@Lembik Does Lagrange have anything to do with it? :P

No problem. This is what image editors were made for.

@El'endiaStarman but you didn't ask me how to convert to and from point-value representation quickly!

@Geobits very kind

@El'endiaStarman no :)

Try Fourier

hmm

if you think about it it will quickly transform your life

...

@MartinBüttner Do you already know about the links for Folders and Meta still showing in markdown instead of as links?

har har :P

:)

@trichoplax I don't, thank you.

just fixed the pun :)

FFTs are integral to my hearing. :)

:)

@MartinBüttner how do we feel about "catalogue" in question titles? "Cat Catalogue" is tempting

CATalog[ue]

catalog

It's a horribly cheesy/punny title and that's exactly what we want when it hits HNQ! :P

@trichoplax I'm not a great fan of that, because there isn't really (supposed to be) anything special about the catalogue challenges.

@feersum If that would show up in the question list it should be the title...

Need to find monospaced Unicode characters.

@Geobits how do you feel about my posting the challenge now?

Fair enough. It's not a pun that's worth causing trouble elsewhere for...

cat a log! >_>

@feersum en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monospace_%28Unicode%29 ?

> Given a log, return it to the user as-is.

^ this. this. this.

@MartinBüttner blimey.. patience!

I think I'll keep calling it cat, with reference to esolangs.org/wiki/Cat

the problem is that I write challenges when I have spare time

and I don't have spare time 72 hours later

@Lembik Mine generally wait 6 to 12 months - 72 hours isn't a maximum

@Lembik I know what you mean... my latest challenge was in the sandbox for over a year. But it ended up being much better than if I had just posted it at the time.

@MartinBüttner a year!!

@MartinBüttner I am assuming your challenges are like great works of art where mine are a new use a stamp I just bought :)

@trichoplax are they worked on continuously for 6 to 12 months?

Wow @Martin. I edit my sandbox post and you delete your obsolete comment within minutes.

@Lembik Uhhhh... well no

@Rainbolt it took me 4, that was comparably long :D

@GamrCorps gasp

how long do people write answers for? In my experience people work on them for about 1 to 2 weeks and then largely stop

I had submissions to Wolf for about a month and a half IIRC

@Lembik pretty much. with rare exceptions.

it doesn't make too much sense to me to spend 6 months preparing something that will be worked on for 1 or 2 weeks

@El'endiaStarman ikr. I just looked this morning to find that.

@Lembik Depends how many people will spend 1 or 2 weeks on it...

@GamrCorps DevilCorps.

That's mine from a few weeks ago. :P

@trichoplax good point... but I think in general these must be very sophisticated questions

@Lembik Well you aren't literally slaving over it for 6 months. You just fix little pieces of it now and then, and let it gain some polish.

mine are embarrassingly trivial by comparison

You don't have to spend every waking moment between the start of writing a challenge and posting it to main working on it.

Plus, even if it takes you weeks to make, there are 10-20 people who benefit from it

@feersum oh :)

@Rainbolt that makes sense

A lot of the time is just waiting for plenty of feedback

I was first, feersum gets stars :(

Happy? Sympathy star :P

it's a very nice model

@Rainbolt His was more Pythy. :P

(I'm sorry, that was bad.)

but it makes me think we should have harder non-golf challenges :)

Okay, rewrote the introductory paragraph for cat a bit to distinguish between "a cat program" and cat.

if people are really going to spend months perfecting their questions

So how do I actually score Scratch? The meta post has no real conclusion, just a bunch of options. I'm pretty sure my heading is going to be #Scratch, ? bytes at this point.

These programs do work identically to cat called with no arguments.

@Geobits I saw one earlier that had a pretty decent encoding. A couple days ago, I think.

@Lembik Harder questions are welcome. Easy questions hit HNQ and get more rep, so there's less incentive to make hard questions that attract few answers.

@Geobits Ah-ha!

Wow I just realized Dan golfed his 8k bytes of java code

I was too embarassed to admit back then that I couldn't even solve my own challenge

So I pretended like I was just going to post later and then forgot, but honestly I tried and failed

@El'endiaStarman Hmm, looks like I have 317 in that encoding. Needs golfing :)

@trichoplax unfortunately this will incentivise me to put in a new variant of my famous binary matrix puzzle :)

@Rainbolt I think that's the one I wasted several sheets of notebook paper on :D

i type in dvorak. i have a raspberry pi that uses qwerty. i can ssh in and it's fine because the characters i type are sent to the pi, not the keys i pressed to send them. but for some reason in nano some of them don't work right. when i try to type "+" it shows up as a comma instead. this makes no sense to me

Well, + on qwerty would be }

If you set your keyboard layout to qwerty does it work normally?

locally?

so.. no python gurus in?

@Geobits I think I wasted several sheets of notebook paper in response

we have an R answer already!

and we don't want to have R >> Python :)

@Lembik I'm fairly good at Python, though I wouldn't call myself a guru...

oh, weird

@El'endiaStarman ah! Are you tempted to beat R in codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/62095/… ?

i thought it was a keyboard layout issue but it doesn't look to be the case

@Rainbolt If you don't want to post it in the next couple of hours, I might be able to write a reference implementation in CJam to get you test cases.

@MartinBüttner I don't intend to post it today

now that i've done more extensive testing, shift-= works properly, but the + on the tenkey does not

@Lembik Eh, not really interested. I don't often use Python for graphical stuff.

@MartinBüttner can pyth/cjam plot pixels?

That said, I do have another language that I use for graphics...

@MartinBüttner I'll probably post on Monday or Tuesday

@El'endiaStarman no problem

@El'endiaStarman oooh.. what's that?

@Lembik To the screen? No. They can write to a file or rather stdout though.

@Lembik Blitz 2D/3D.

@MartinBüttner ah ok

@El'endiaStarman interesting

@Rainbolt Alright, then I'll see what I can do over the weekend.

@Lembik You won't be able to run it on Ubuntu though. It's a Windows-only language.

@El'endiaStarman well that holds for TI-BASIC too.. is it free?

I could run it in wine maybe

and at least someone could test it!

Pretty much, yes.

@MartinBüttner I have an idea of what to do in case you decide not to. I'll just make up a fake day and show what it looks like if you fall off the bottom of the world

And don't worry, I'll test it. :P

:)

I always test my answers.

it's good if a non-author can test answers too imho

You could just use a single number as the O position instead of ASCII art for output. Zero indexed, it looks like the sequence so far is 12, 16, 20, 17.