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9:00 PM
Spawned by this discussion.

So, basically the title covers it all.

What would be the most minimal action required for stating that an action constituted programming?
I don't know what else to put in the meta question.
 
I would argue that "designing a pattern that is especially difficult to reverse" would be considered programming if any kind of analysis went into it.
 
@PhiNotPi I'm asking what I should put in the meta question though, aside of the thing posted above.
 
The problem with this challenge is that someone can go click a bunch of random stuff, say "this looks like a bunch of cells" call it good enough and be competitive.
 
@TimmyD Trying to reverse-engineer that L-shape in the upper left corner...
 
@FlagAsSpam I wasn't really attempting to answer that question.
 
9:04 PM
@PhiNotPi Oh. Whoops. c:
 
The L-shape is easy... if it were just the L shape in one step.
 
I haven't yet figured out how to get the L shape in one step.
 
...o
.o..
...o
o.o.
 
I think it would be interesting.
 
@PhiNotPi ah, yup, okay
 
9:07 PM
But I would say it is extremely unlikely that was the actual step.
 
The "curve" on the upper right also looks vaguely familiar.
 
We need a Conway's Game of Life site.
 
Maybe.
 
or just cellularautomaton.SE in general
 
Also, latest feature addition for my current in-progress esolang design: Nulladic functions.
 
9:08 PM
^ Wat?
I need a bot to replace carrots with replies.
 
I'm working on another esolang design.
 
constant functions?
 
(we have no clue what nulladic means)
functions with no input?
 
@SuperJedi224 ...no parameter functions?
You could've just said that.
C'mon, @NewMetaPosts....
 
9:11 PM
Sodium friggin hurts when splashed on your face. :(
 
Huh.
== Hungarian == === Etymology === nulla +‎ -dik === Pronunciation === IPA(key): /ˈnulːɒdik/ Hyphenation: nul‧la‧dik === Numeral === nulladik (ordinal) zeroth...
 
Now to add in some mathematical constants and start implementing the random namespace.
 
@RikerW ...elemental sodium?
 
Yes.
It exploded during our science experiment.
:(
The teacher tripped and dropped like 2 cubic inches in.
 
"Isn't that one of the ones that goes 'boom' on contact with water?" [checks periodic table] "....yup."
 
9:12 PM
I was too close...
 
0
Q: What constitutes "programming"?

FlagAsSpamSpawned by this discussion. So, basically the title covers it all. What would be the most minimal action required for stating that said action would be considered programming in this community?

 
Good story for later though... :P
 
@El'endiaStarman Yeah, and a 2*2*2 piece makes a big boom.
It looked cool though. :P
@El'endiaStarman Ageed.
It stings.
BTW, I found a lot of lava in your mine earlier today on Minecraft @El'endiaStarman.
I lost 2 diamonds.
 
@RikerW diamonds that you had already mined, or diamonds in the process of mining?
either way, that always sucks
 
9:15 PM
One each.
 
@RikerW Well, yeah, the mine is at that level. :P
 
Is there 3D GoL?
 
Link pls?
Sounds epic.
 
I don't have to look it up or anything. :P
I know it exists.
Now, whether or not an easy tool exists...
 
Anonymous
9:16 PM
Blergh. Student loan payment day
 
@RikerW Oh, also, would you mind filling in holes and pits that you dig with cobblestone or whatever? It's what I've been doing and it makes the mine look nicer (as well as effectively eliminate spawning spots for mobs, and reducing the amount of clutter in one's inventory).
 
@Mego Heh, I wish I could afford to make payments. My student loans are on forbearance as I don't have a job.
 
@El'endiaStarman Okay.
 
@Maltysen Sweet, he used Three.js, like I would have if I had done that.
 
9:18 PM
Will do later, in class now. :P
 
@Maltysen Oh my days.
 
@RikerW so what? :P
 
The language I'm working on uses arbbitrary precision rationals as its primary numeric type
 
@SuperJedi224 O.O
 
This is the scariest chemical I've ever come across (thankfully, not in person).
Chlorine trifluoride is an interhalogen compound with the formula ClF3. This colourless, poisonous, corrosive, and extremely reactive gas condenses to a pale-greenish yellow liquid, the form in which it is most often sold (pressurized at room temperature). The compound is primarily of interest as a component in rocket fuels, in plasmaless cleaning and etching operations in the semiconductor industry, in nuclear reactor fuel processing, and other industrial operations. == Preparation, structure, and properties == It was first reported in 1930 by Ruff and Krug who prepared it by fluorinatio...
 
9:20 PM
@Maltysen True, it is basic electromagnetic stuff, ie what is a volt.
 
Dioxygen difluoride is a compound of fluorine and oxygen with the molecular formula O 2F 2. It exists as an orange solid that melts into a red liquid at −163 °C (110 K). It is an extremely strong oxidant and decomposes into oxygen and fluorine even at −160 °C (113 K) at a rate of 4% per day: its lifetime at room temperature is thus extremely short. Dioxygen difluoride reacts with nearly every chemical it encounters – even ordinary ice – leading to its onomatopoeic nickname "FOOF" (a play on its chemical structure). The material has no practical applications, but has been of theoretical interest...
> The material has no practical applications,
HAHA. I wonder why! :P
 
Plutonium hexafluoride is the highest fluoride of plutonium, and is of interest for laser enrichment of plutonium, in particular for the production of pure plutonium-239 from irradiated uranium. This pure plutonium is needed to avoid premature ignition of low-mass nuclear weapon designs by neutrons produced by spontaneous fission of plutonium-240. It is a red-brown volatile crystalline solid; the heat of sublimation is 12.1 kcal/mol and the heat of vaporization 7.4 kcal/mol. It is relatively hard to handle, being very corrosive and prone to auto-radiolysis. It is prepared by fluorination of plutonium...
 
Anonymous
@El'endiaStarman I just had to apply for forbearance for that exact reason. I'm pretty hopeful about an application I sent out yesterday, though.
 
I think that is stupider.
 
@RikerW That stuff is bad.
 
9:22 PM
@Mego Yeah, my experience has been good. Applied twice (for three months each), approved twice.
 
Anonymous
If March comes around and I still don't have a job, that'll be really bad
 
Anonymous
11 months unemployed
 
Fluoroantimonic acid (systematically named fluoranium hexafluorostibanuide and fluoranium hexafluoridoantimonate(1−)) is an inorganic compound with the chemical formula H 2FSbF 6 (also written H 2F[SbF 6], 2HF•SbF5, or simply HF-SbF5). It is an ionic liquid created by reacting hydrogen fluoride (HF) with antimony pentafluoride (SbF5) in a stoichiometric ratio of 2:1. It is the strongest known superacid, which has been demonstrated to protonate even hydrocarbons to afford carbocations and H2. Similar acids can be created by using excess antimony pentafluoride. The reaction to produce fluoroantimonic...
 
@El'endiaStarman Sure, but that doesn't really exist. Chlorine trifluoride does, and actually is used.
 
0
A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

msh210Find the line guaranteed by Sylvester-Gallai geometry The Sylvester-Gallai theorem says: Suppose you have a finite list of points in the plane. Suppose further that not all of those points are collinear (lie in a single line). Then there is some line containing precisely two of the points. (Tha...

 
9:23 PM
Atomic vapor laser isotope separation (AVLIS) is a method by which specially tuned lasers are used to separate isotopes of uranium using selective ionization of hyperfine transitions. In the largest technology transfer in U.S. government history, in 1994 the AVLIS process was transferred to the United States Enrichment Corporation for commercialization. However, on June 9, 1999 after a $100 million investment, USEC cancelled its AVLIS program. The AVLIS process provides high energy efficiency comparable with gas centrifuges, high separation factor, and low volume of radioactive waste. AVLIS continues...
I think I like Avlis the dnd campaign better...
 
@Mego I'm in a very similar situation, it seems. You can apply for up to three years of loan forbearance (a year at most per application). Well, with Fedloan Servicing, anyway.
 
Something where, if it's burning so you activate anti-burning measures, like throwing asbestos or sand onto it ... and then it starts burning the sand ... is a Thing I Want To Avoid.
 
Anonymous
The above is a WikiTrout (Oncorhynchus macrowikipediensis), used to make subtle adjustments to the clue levels of experienced Wikipedians. To whack a user with a wet trout, simply place {{trout}} on his or her talk page. For newcomers (or for a less spammy version), use a {{minnow}}, {{diet trout small}} or {{diet trout}}. For a styleable version that can, e.g., be floated the right of talk page posts, use {{minnow}}. For not-so-subtle adjustments, try a {{whale}}. Any Wikipedian who wants to advertise an openness to being trout-slapped can add {{trout me}} to the top of his or her user page. ...
 
roflmao
Aww, busted.
 
9:26 PM
 
Anonymous
@El'endiaStarman The fed is like a nicer mafia. They want their money, but they're at least nice enough to be patient.
 
@FlagAsSpam Yeah, that made the rounds on the media and internet a while ago. You can alternatively think of it as a temperature hotter than all other temperatures... :P
@Mego Haha, yeah, that's fairly accurate.
 
@FlagAsSpam That is retardedly wrong. :P
 
@RikerW o-o Er. Wat?
 
9:28 PM
@TimmyD Indeed, indeed...
 
> it mimics 'dark energy', the mysterious force
Ooooo....
I swear, I can't read the word "mysterious" anywhere without silently going "ooooo" to myself.
 
Anonymous
A good visualization of how temperature works:
 
Anonymous
 
Anonymous
Right is hotter
 
lol image not found
 
Anonymous
9:30 PM
(not 100% accurate)
 
are you sure that is a good visualization?
:P
 
It's a 500 internal server error.
 
^
Not found must be hotter than image. o-o
 
Anonymous
Works better when I paste the right link
 
I saw a different visualization I prefer...lemme find it.
 
Anonymous
9:31 PM
:26762981 Common being base 10?
 
Do what in wat?
 
this is getting confusing.
 
Not the one I was thinking of but I think this is better.
 
Hi swirly circle...
 
Anonymous
9:32 PM
That's much more accurate
 
Not going away though...
 
Rational explanations of common logarithm.
 
Ooh, cool image.
 
Temperature is toroidal.
Mind blown.
 
Anonymous
For x in [1, 9], log(x) ≈ 1
 
9:33 PM
This is the one I saw:
 
@FlagAsSpam That makes suprising sense.
 
@El'endiaStarman All I see is marbles in a pit.
 
Hey a raspberry pi comes with Mathematica? mind blown...
 
9:33 PM
^ I knew this.
 
I suppose we could use log10(a/b)=_log10(a)-_log10(b) but that wouldn't be a great estimate
 
@FlagAsSpam Same sense as the one before. Also, that one doesn't come with a convenient in-the-picture explanation.
 
@FlagAsSpam I didn't...
Cool though.
 
It's the main reason why I'm trying to emulate Raspberry Pi.
 
@RikerW that's probably cheaper than buying mathematica alone
 
9:34 PM
^ agreed.
 
Anonymous
Probably cheaper to fab your own pi
 
rofl
Aww, busted again.
 
@Mego s/fab/emulate/
 
@Maltysen Search your feelings, you know it to be true.
 
Sounds like a job for Raspberry Phi
12
 
9:35 PM
Pi is about 245850922/78256779
Phi is about 63245986/39088169
 
@SuperJedi224 ...or 22/7 for us lazy, imprecise golfers. c:
 
^
 
But I need much better approximations for the reference implementation of a language
 
@FlagAsSpam *:⊃
 
@RikerW ...that one looks too dongular.
 
9:36 PM
That's an emoticon I haven't seen before.
 
@ZachGates Hmm... that gives me an idea.
 
colon + superset sign
:⊃
colon + subset sign
:⊂
@PhiNotPi ^^^^
 
Orr just use lowercase c and switch it around.
c: :c
 
:C
 
In certain fonts, the c curves inward, which is why I use it.
 
9:38 PM
^^ extreme sadness
 
Are there any good rational approximation algorithms for the common logarithm of an arbitrary rational number?
 
@FlagAsSpam I don't like when the colon is on the end.
 
Anonymous
In mathematics, the logarithm is the inverse operation to exponentiation. That means the logarithm of a number is the exponent to which another fixed value, the base, must be raised to produce that number. In simple cases the logarithm counts repeated multiplication. For example, the base 10 logarithm of 1000 is 3, as 10 to the power 3 is 1000 (1000 = 10 × 10 × 10 = 103); the multiplication is repeated three times. More generally, exponentiation allows any positive real number to be raised to any real power, always producing a positive result, so the logarithm can be calculated for any two positive...
 
Also my "Kylo Ren Paints A Picture" drawing still has a higher score than any of my other panels.
 
9:39 PM
@RikerW You really don't like the digestive system, then.
 
@SuperJedi224 this is cool: log2 x ≈ ln x + log10 x.
 
@FlagAsSpam Yeah... I don't.
 
Anonymous
@FlagAsSpam It's pretty shitty
 
We should have a bot, that, whenever somebody gets 10 stars, it says "Ten points for Gryffindor!"
 
Anonymous
Psh, nerd
 
9:40 PM
@Mego Makes me want to vomit.
 
Anonymous
10 points for Slytherin
 
> anytime somebody gets 1 star
 
@PhiNotPi Oh, geez, no.
We'd die.
 
Anonymous
Gryffindorks
 
And Gryffindor would have, like, 50 billion points.
 
Anonymous
9:41 PM
Here's how that would work:
 
I suppose I could encode a lookup table of the common logarithms for every number from 100 to 999 or something, but I really don't want to do that.
 
Anonymous
The more immature chatters would start starring everything to get the bot to spam
 
Anonymous
They'd get kicked/banned for star abuse
 
Anonymous
And then everybody else would be a lot more conservative with their stars to avoid the spam
 
Anonymous
...Actually, this sounds like a great idea
 
Anonymous
9:42 PM
 
@Maltysen Are you sure this is correct?
 
^no
I got it from the interwebs
 
@PhiNotPi He put an (ಠ_ಠ) approximately equal to in there.
 
@PhiNotPi it seems to work pretty well
 
okay
 
9:44 PM
@Mego That sounds good. Then there would be more stars for my code golf guide so that new users could benefit from the starboard
(joke)
 
Anonymous
Maximum difference between the approximation and Python's math.log(x,2) for x in range(1, 101): -0.03868600378663345
 
Also, TIL why the elephant is PHP's mascot: elePHPant
 
@Mego That's quite a bit of error.
 
Anonymous
Maximum relative error: 0.0030763191111280452 (for x = 3)
 
@Mego What's this for?
 
9:46 PM
@Maltysen Wow that actually works much better than expected.
 
@ZachGates Thanks for the PR. Could you undo the changes to the README though? A Unix user will likely know they can omit the ruby when there is a shebang, but a Windows user not familiar with Unix might not know they have to add it.
 
@MartinBüttner Sure, no problem
 
Anonymous
7 mins ago, by Maltysen
@SuperJedi224 this is cool: log2 x ≈ ln x + log10 x.
 
But I specifically asked for a RATIONAL approximation.
 
Anonymous
The neat thing is, the relative error decreases as x increases
 
9:48 PM
@Mego Huh.
 
@SuperJedi224 Maybe you could look at the Taylor series?
 
Anonymous
Relative error for 1000 is 5.802900567995017e-05
 
@Mego How about x = e?
 
@El'endiaStarman You are a meth math guy. Have you seen this challenge? codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/69154/…
 
rofl
 
9:50 PM
@El'endiaStarman "only provide accurate approximations in the range 0 < x ≤ 2"
 
@flawr I saw it, yeah. Didn't really read closely or think about it.
 
Anonymous
 
But I suppose I could use properties of logarithms from there
 
@MartinBüttner: I've removed the commit
 
Hm ok.
 
Anonymous
9:50 PM
Peak is actually at x = e
 
Anonymous
I was originally only doing integers
 
Knew it. :D
 
Anonymous
Graph is relative errors for [1,1000]
 
A plain old graph of log_2(x) and ln(x) + log_10(x): desmos.com/calculator/4quazzcnrz
 
Anonymous
Wait I think I messed up relative errors again
 
9:52 PM
ln x + ln x / ln 10 - ln x / ln 2 = -1
 
For the small values of x you'll have to zoom in otherwise it just looks like one purple curve
 
x~~4992105172092184537735145151451160864660819116294144
^ where the approximation is off by one
 
Anonymous
Yeah I definitely messed up relative error
 
Anonymous
 
@ZachGates merged
damn, Hexagony lost two stars
 
9:54 PM
wow that looks a lot different
 
@Mego codez?
 
Anonymous
The first graph was abs(actual-approx)/x
 
that means Retina is in the lead again :D
 
Anonymous
Second is actual relative error, abs(actual-approx)/actual
 
@MartinBüttner Aww.
Wait,wat?
 
Anonymous
9:54 PM
@quartata Sage
 
Anonymous
x=var('x')
f(x)=log(x,2)
g(x)=log(x,10)+log(x)
plot(abs(f(x)-g(x))/abs(f(x)), xmin=1, xmax=1000)
 
@Mego Noting the y-axis scale...I think you've got noise there from numerical inaccuracies.
 
Anonymous
@El'endiaStarman Probably
 
@RikerW You just reminded me of a sodium compound that fascinated me when I first heard of it: Na+Na- (a salt containing only sodium ions - both negative and positive)
An alkalide is a chemical compound in which alkali metals are anions (that is, they bear a negative charge). Such species are notable because alkali metals were previously thought to appear in salts only as cations. Alkalide compounds have also been synthesized containing a cation of the alkaline earth metal barium. == "Normal" chemistry: the case of Na+Edit == Alkali metals are well known to form salts. Table salt, or sodium chloride Na+Cl−, illustrates the usual role of an alkali metal such as sodium: its positive charge is balanced by a negatively charged ion in the empirical formula for this...
 
9:55 PM
isn't Sage rationals?
 
@trichoplax Cool.
 
or is it just Python floats
 
@El'endiaStarman One of the best scales I've seen in a while.
 
Anonymous
Sage is rationals
 
@RikerW P.S. I hope your face feels better
 
9:55 PM
Since I used a solid modelling program last semester.
 
I doesn't. :P
 
Anonymous
Though I'm not sure if it wraps math.log for rationals
 
@PhiNotPi I wonder how long it'll be before that appears in a newspaper.
 
@Mego I think that that relative error remains constant
 
> CHAOS EVERYWHERE
 
9:56 PM
> Today's stock market
 
@El'endiaStarman btw, some credit for the bitwise CAs goes to Sp3000. he suggested looking at bitplanes when I was trying to figure out how to define CA rules for arbitrary-precision integer states, in order to make a Turing-complete CA framework on a finite domain.
 
huh, okay
 
Anonymous
Yep, it does wrap math.log for rationals, so it shouldn't be numerical error
 
(^.^)/ what's this about?
 
ayyy
 
9:58 PM
@El'endiaStarman (also, I should have mentioned, the concept also works for signed integers, using 2's complement, by applying the rule to the background as well. although it means that the signs will always be modified independently of the values)
@Sp3000 they were talking about CAs earlier, so I mentioned the "1.5D" CAs we were discussing
 
Ah, nice :)
 
@flawr hi
 
@Sp3000: Have you seen my Variations of Life tool?
 
I'm not really sure how the 1.5D CAs work
 
Polling for esolang ideas: Any features people would want to see in a golfy bash/zsh variant?
 

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