The Nineteenth Byte

Bob the Bowman o /( )\ This is Bob. L L Bob wants to be an archer. ############# . / \ <--- bow So he bought himself a (c -)-> <--- arrow ...

@StainRebel

Calvin's Hobbies

2:52 AM

Do we have a challenge about turning a string into a literal hashtag?

 k y
kitty
 t t
yttik
 y k

Like that for kitty

PhiNotPi

I feel like there's been one for turning it into a box or something.

Calvin's Hobbies

I think I did something similar but I can't remember..

Q: Reconstruct a Text Rectangle from Diagonal Strips

6:17 AM

1

This challenge is inspired by a SO question about traversing a matrix by enumerating all its diagonal strips. Instead of a matrix, consider a block of text: ABCD EFGH IJKL Traversing this block's SW-NE diagonals from left to right, starting from the top left corner and ending in the bottom ri...

code-golf

New Sandboxed Posts

7:32 AM

0

Drop of Chaos (Constructing a Minimally Aperiodic Sequence) The idea here is to produce an almost repeating pattern. That is, the sequence being constructed changes at the last moment to avoid a repetition of some subsequence. Subsequences of the type AA and ABA are to be avoided (where B is no ...

7:49 AM

@NewSandboxedPosts First proposed challenge!

As a side note, I am now thinking about how to extend my idea to 2D. I think that could make for some interesting patterns...

9:42 AM

@El'endiaStarman sounds really interesting :)

New Sandboxed Posts

10:32 AM

0

Will you help me become a Norseman? Norseman is considered to be the hardest triathlon in the world (for distances equivalent to those of an Ironman race). Having finished a "normal" Ironman race, the next step is Norseman. I need assistance on the way, to help me keep track of the time, and t...

@El'endiaStarman interesting: if you allow 4s for the non-repeating sequence they are still very rare when always choosing the lowest possible digit

in the first 150 elements, I get only two 4s

Q: Digital River(Shortest And Fastest Solution)

2:46 PM

0

This is my first question. So I hope it goes good Background First: It's not the rivers that you might be thinking about. The question revolves around the concept of digital rivers. A digital river is a sequence of numbers where the number following n is n plus the sum of its digits. ...

code-golf fastest-algorithm

3:02 PM

I know its a Wednesday and all, but it's way too quiet in here.

I nearly died of a glass of cocoa today at work :'(

Ok, you're excused. Anyone else have a reason for not chatting? Preferably one that includes near-death experience(s).

@Geobits Thanks! :D

@jrenk How does that even work?

@ChrisJester-Young I was drinking and started laughing so hard that I got so much cocoa in my lungs that I had to do a handstand to get it out..

3:10 PM

Should have let it stay there. That's how Count Chocula got started. You missed out on immortality.

Result of my Autopsy: Drowned in Cocoa

Things I shouldn't notice (but do): It's nice when arbitrary sentences form pronounceable acronyms without any reason to. From the last two messages:

SHLIST

ROMA: DIC

today i found out that doorknob's username wasn't always doorknob

I assume it was "unshaped piece of metal" before he was a doorknob ;)

interesting that you mention metal ;)

it was a different material altogether

3:21 PM

Hmm, time to investigate :D

Well, it will be once my internet connection starts working. WTH, stupid work network?

", said Geobits, on the internet

Investigation sucks on mobile :P

ohh

3:47 PM

i just encounter a super mario maker level that was just a bunch of goombas in a line that you could just jump once and hold right

i commented "creative & challenging" because i'm an asshole and i want them to feel bad about my sarcastic comment

i s2g i'm the only person who's made a reasonable level in this whole game, they're all baby easy or basically impossible

i have one that's basically impossible but the other one is reasonable i think but no one's done it yet, oh well

Q: Can you help me become a Norseman?

0

Norseman is considered to be the hardest triathlon in the world (for distances equivalent to those of an Ironman race). Having finished a "normal" Ironman race, the next step is Norseman. I need assistance on the way, to help me keep track of the time, and tell me if I'm in ahead of schedule or...

code-golf number

i misread that n as an h and i was really excited about a potential code-golf question about becoming a harbringer of the apocolypse

@doorknob there's a joke i really want to make about that ^ but it's spoilers. i'm sure you'll know which joke i want to make and will appreciate the thought regardless

we already have llama-man, that's is not working out that great

Q: Outputting an base-proof expression

0

Background In some possible futures, the world will convert their numerical systems from decimal (base 10 or b10) to some other base (binary b2, octal b8, hexadecimal b16, or even unary b1, in which case we're screwed!). Thus, in preparation for this possible world-changing event, you decide to ...

code-challenge metagolf

if you're here for the test involving praying mantis DNA, unfortunately, it's been cancelled. luckily, we have a much better test: fighting an army of mantis-men!

it's been too long since i played portal 2 so i don't remember the real quote. my apologies

3:59 PM

@undergroundmonorail After a brief search, I found his (what I think to be) original username. It's certainly the oldest one I could find. I don't know if he's changed it in between (other than adding snow/ice for the holidays).

oh man, that must be what that was

for the record i found "ofsnow"

didn't see the date though

mb mb

Looks like he shortened it to just Doorknob sometime between 3-10 Dec 2012. There used to be an adjective on the front :)

i can't wait for him to come on and appreciate my excellent joke concept

Q: Crazy Librarian Sorting System

4:21 PM

1

It's back to school season! So for a part-time job, you're helping out at the school's library. The problem is, the head librarian has never even heard the words "Dewey Decimal," let alone implemented that system. Instead, the sorting system in use has grown "organically" as the library has expan...

code-golf math string arithmetic sorting

Doorknob

@undergroundmonorail Hahaha, something something preserve its enemies? :D

@Geobits right, I've only ever been PicklishDoorknob and Doorknob (except for holidays and such)

you have been doorknob<chinese thingy>

Doorknob

> (except for holidays and such)

@Doorknob i'm going to be honest, i've spent less than an hour in the game that my joke would have been a spoiler for

i just read about it on the internet

so i don't know what that means haha

I was Generic Holiday Name for a while, but that got boring.

4:30 PM

1

Q: Make your typing wavy!

Write a program that takes a string and splits it into "waves," according to the following rules. There are two lines of characters in STDOUT for each line in STDIN. If there is a line break in the input to STDIN, then the waves the lines would form in STDOUT are separated by an additional line...

code-golf

Doorknob

@undergroundmonorail ah. If you try to apply a tinning kit to a Rider corpse on Astral, you get the message "yes, but <spoiler> does not preserve its enemies," which is one of the only actual in-game references to <spoiler>

Ohhh. Neat!

I am hovering over <spoiler> but its not revealing it.

You need to highlight it.

still no :(

4:35 PM

test

T_T

okay cool

hover for spoilers

neat!

@Doorknob you should learn!

Oh boo, it's a nethack spoiler. I thought it would be for something decent :P

4:54 PM

I think nobody ever asked a question on elliptic curves, right? (I already used the search, but just to be sure there were no deleted ones)

@flawr Be sure to search the sandbox too, if you haven't already.

I think Peter has had one in the sandbox for ages

3

Implement elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman Although the reputation of elliptic curves in general took a hit in 2013 due to suspicions that the NSA may have backdoored the parameter values of the common standard curves, Dan Bernstein's Curve25519 appears to be free of those suspicions. It therefore ...

@MartinBüttner Upvoted.

I generally like crypto-related challenges.

(assuming real crypto, not vigenere or the like)

Yptocray isay onay igbay ealday :P

:-P

I had half a mind to propose implementing SHA-2 (SHA-256, SHA-512, SHA-512/t, etc.) as a golfy challenge, but with some twists (e.g., different initialisation tables) so that standard library functions generate wrong results.

5:05 PM

"Given a Voynich manuscript, determine whether it's the most devious cryptogram of the last millenium or an elaborate hoax."

I thought it was a devious cryptogram describing an elaborate hoax.

5:17 PM

@ChrisJester-Young Oh, good idea. I just thought about implementing the "addition" on a elliptic curve (or perhaps another type of curve), but that alone probably is not very intersting if you do it in lR instead of another specific field.

5:27 PM

@MartinBüttner Yeah, if you pick the lowest next digit, you will get 4s. Then 5s. And so on. There's actually a really interesting pattern for when the next digit shows up: {1:2, 2:3 3:5, 4:15, 5:30, 6:90, 7:180, 8:540}. I have no idea why though.

@El'endiaStarman huh, that's pretty cool

FryAmTheEggman

5:52 PM

@Dennis vu?qH\Z\Z+?qH\y"subsets(""head("+G\)_zk will parse a string of pyth containing only y, h and Z.

Dennis

@FryAmTheEggman Thanks, but that's not why I deleted it. y doesn't appear in the list of allowed operations.

FryAmTheEggman

Oh, right. Well good luck :P

Peter Taylor

6:14 PM

@ChrisJester-Young There are a couple of SHA questions already.

@PeterTaylor Huh, I searched the sandbox and couldn't find anything, but maybe those were posted without going through the sandbox?

There are a couple answers to this challenge with little or no golfing effort and incorrect byte counts. :/

That's weird. You'd think someone would have downvoted them when noticing that ;)

They're new users. I figured I'd give them the opportunity to golf before I downvote.

They're also updating the language to add new features while answering this question :( github.com/HassiumTeam/Hassium/tree/master/src

At the very least the "golfed" one is. The commit to add the range function used was 2 hours ago.

6:27 PM

|:(

I'm letting him know.

What's our policy? Make it CW, it's invalid, or they just can't win?

I just realized something

What's that?

Q: Can any PEG grammar be parsed in linear time?

the computer science stackexchange site has custom programming

0

On the Wikipedia for PEG it is claimed: Any PEG can be parsed in linear time by using a packrat parser, as described above. However, packrat parsers can't handle left recursion. You can eliminate any left recursion to create another grammar that recognizes the same language as the left-rec...

complexity-theory formal-grammars parsers

it features a 'cite' button

next to the share/edit buttons

I'm looking for the appropriate meta post now. At the very least, "just can't win". I normally downvote also unless it's very clear that it wasn't done intentionally (and fixed or noted).

Dennis

@AlexA. This seems to be a general purpose language. A disclaimer stating that the language/version required to make this work is newer than the challenge should be sufficient.

6:33 PM

@orlp Oh cool. What does it do?

Dennis

@AlexA. Now, a "language" that happens to incorporate this exact same task as a built-in is noise and should simply be deleted.

IMHO anyway.

@AlexA. click it?

@orlp haha

@Dennis Agreed

@Dennis Yep, I did that

feersum

What makes CS more cite-worthy than any other site?

orlp is there

6:35 PM

orlyp

Q: Add the ability to cite questions and answers

I don't know if that's exactly "custom programming" or not. At least two other sites have the cite button, so it may just be something enabled/disabled on a per-site level:

43

The Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science Stack Exchange sites have a great feature that allows a user to quickly create a citation to answers and questions. This is accomplished by clicking share and then clicking cite: For ease of copying and pasting the cite feature even provides the...

discussion feature-request citation

feersum

The site needs to have a sufficient proportion of TeX users?

Alex A., the range has always been in Hassium, I just forgot to put in the correct file so it wasn't usable. — zdimension 46 secs ago

Q: Drop of Chaos (Constructing a Minimally Aperiodic Sequence)

0

The idea here is to produce an almost repeating pattern. That is, the sequence being constructed changes at the last moment to avoid a repetition of some subsequence. Subsequences of the type AA and ABA are to be avoided (where B is no longer than A). Examples: I'll go ahead and start by listin...

code-golf sequence subsequence

@AlexA. That would be more convincing (to me at least) if I could find it anywhere in the actually-decently-often-modified documentation.

Hmm. It does appear that there was a range function in the Array class, but I'm not sure what effect that would have had on the golfiness, if any.

6:48 PM

Yeah. Well, I left my note there but I revoked my downvote for now.

Ok, well I'm calling shenanigans. Looking at his sole other answer on the site, it's a date formatting challenge (answered an hour ago). What else got changed/added along with the range function? toString in the Date class.

I can't seem to find the proof that there exists a square-free word over {0, 1, 2}

A: HAKMEM 39: Repetition-less digit strings

7

This paper gives a very nice elementary presentation of the Thue-Morse sequence and in particular of the result that there is an infinite square-free sequence over an alphabet of three letters.

@El'endiaStarman thanks

7:05 PM

Hola amigos

Hallo Freund

Ça va?

I am out of languages.

Haha you've missed English ;)

I assumed the case default: does not count.

7:12 PM

Oh okay haha :)

How do you do?

I'm good thanks. Just waiting for the weekend

What about you?

Aren't we all.

Haha I've got three tests on Saturday though:P

My headmaster hates us all

On what subjects?

Mauris

7:15 PM

@Dennis I guess pinging you in here is a better idea: should I count the curly braces in your correction on my "Diagonal Strips" CJam solution?

@Geobits ಠ_ಠ

@flawr Uhh Geography, Physics and... Let me check

Tests on a Saturday? That's criminal.

I think it would be a good thing to know in advance what you are tested on.

Jumping on the foreign language bandwagon: su'cuy auretiise. (Literally, "hello foreigners", as a Mandalorian would say.)

7:16 PM

hmm, did we flag another message in here?

Haha are you wondering why there's extra blue?

no, a foreign mod dropped by

@Optimizer This foreign mod?

@Optimizer That's what I mean

foreign mod == extra blue

7:18 PM

^

there is already extra blue in here, I don't think so putting a drop in ocean counts

Not that we don't normally have a bunch of blue in here :P

I think we should build a fence around The Nineteenth Byte and start controlling the borders.

5

And make the other sites pay for it.

Q: Drop of Chaos (Constructing a Minimally Aperiodic Sequence)

36 mins ago, by New Main Posts

0

The idea here is to produce an almost repeating pattern. That is, the sequence being constructed changes at the last moment to avoid a repetition of some subsequence. Subsequences of the type AA and ABA are to be avoided (where B is no longer than A). Examples: I'll go ahead and start by listin...

code-golf sequence subsequence

@flawr Mods would still pass through like ghosts.

7:19 PM

I figured you guys had an elaborate system of tunnels.

Not if it's an electric fence.

How about a mirror-fence?

I didn't say we were ghosts...

normal fence = you cannot pass anyways

@El'endiaStarman But you did not say you weren't either. That is very suspicious.

7:20 PM

@flawr English, Geography and Physics

I'm not sure how electric or mirror fences would stop ghosts anyway >_>

Mirror fences would only stop Medusa

Im in ur cofe

We should call in ghost busters!

7:22 PM

@BetaDecay Your name is Michaelmas?

@AlexA. Another reason why I do not like coffee.

D: But I'm in it. And you love me, right?

Michaelmas term

Michaelmas term is the first academic term of the academic year in a number of English-speaking universities and schools, especially in the United Kingdom. Michaelmas term derives its name from the Feast of St Michael and All Angels, which falls on 29 September. The term runs from September or October to Christmas. == The legal year == The term is also the name of the first of four terms into which the legal year is divided by the Courts of England and Wales and the Courts of Northern Ireland. While the name is not used in the legal systems of the United States, the U. S. Supreme Court nevertheless...

@AlexA. Noo, my name's Christian. Michaelmas is the name for the Christmas term (or semester in American)

Wtf it's called Michaelmas for real?

7:23 PM

Of course :D

Dafuq

@AlexA.

I... Michaelmas.

@flawr Yes?

A ghost hit my enter key before I could write the message.

7:24 PM

Michael's Mass : Michaelmas :: Christ's Mass : Christmas

Critical Mass?

Critmas

Hehe my school's listed there :D

@BetaDecay Probably because yours is the only school that calls Christmas "Michael."

Given all you know about me, you probably can work it out through a process of elimination

@AlexA. The feast of St Michael's in September :|

7:25 PM

@Mauris You Michaelmas. Me Alex.

Honestly the only thing I know about you is that you like snowboarding.

^

North Wales

Oh right

And your name is Christmas

It's probably the -15th school on the list.

7:27 PM

I've actually writen Love from Christmas on Christmas cards :P

2

Haha

^

caret

No difference really

Why are all pictures of carrots facing downward

7:30 PM

@AlexA. Because that's how they live in the soil before you pull them out. :-P

That's not how I plant my carrots.

All of the vitamins drain out of the carrot if you hold the pointy end upwards

Hanging carrots ftw

@BetaDecay I feel like that's false but I have no data to the contrary

@ChrisJester-Young They usually aren't carrots yet when I plant them. But perhaps I've been doing it wrong all this time.

@AlexA. Always trust decaying particles

7:32 PM

@flawr What I mean is, that's what they grow into before you pull them out of the soil. :-P

@ChrisJester-Young This is pure guesswork, there is no way you know what they look like before you pull them out!

Interesting, there is a whole website with sterescopic images of various different seeds. 3dham.com/3dseeds/index.html

3

Why am I talking about stereoscopic images of seeds.

3

its bad for random number generators anyways

@flawr Well that's awesome

some of them look like aliens

@Optimizer There's probably enough variation in carrot seeds that you could make a seed function from them.

7:42 PM

@flawr Because you're awesome

@AlexA. Get your own adjective ;)

That's not what the A stands for?

@BetaDecay Oh I didn't even see that you had said that

Awesomelex A.?

^ yes that

7:43 PM

Alex Alex

@AlexA. I do not know how to reply to that, but somewhere in a parallel univers a copy of me would have such a funny response.

^

Thoughts? Well my first thought is that I should change my display name to Alexander the Awesome... — Alex A. ♦ Aug 20 at 23:26

Sounds like a badly conceived Stan Lee character, tbh.

There are well conceived Stan Lee characters?

7:45 PM

Alexander the Authorized?

Haha

Authorized for what?

Idk, just looking for adjectives beginning with 'a'.

:P

Alex the Aggravating

ಠ_ಠ

I feel like that's probably true

7:49 PM

I just like that word. I even have a list of my favourite english words.

I feel like I'm being lied to:

> "A" is the first letter in the alphabet and the most commonly used letter.

Where did you find this?

@flawr You've compiled a list of your favorite English words? I'd like to see this list. :)

Alexander the Achlamydeous

Some terrible site purporting to be a list of A-adjectives. It's riddled with grammar/spelling errors, though.

7:50 PM

@Geobits The honor would actually go to E.

@Geobits Is that flawr's list of favorite English words? :P

Which is, coincidentally, the first letter of my name...

@El'endiaStarman I know, that's why the lie-sensors went off ;)

@El'endiaStarman Contrary to popular belief, œ is actually the most used English letter

@BetaDecay That's certainly contrary.

7:52 PM

haha

:D

@AlexA. It is quite long by now.

How long have you been adding to it?

About 3 years I think

We need to make a challenge out of this

7:57 PM

Golf flawr's list?