The Nineteenth Byte

TimmyD

9:00 PM

@DrGreenEggsandHamDJ Why not TetraVex? (/shameless challenge plug ;-))

Dr Green Eggs and Ham DJ

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm not good at answering challenges, only writing them.

Bald Bantha

the guy who made this random minsweeper site : minesweeperonline.com used to work at SO. huh.

Dr Green Eggs and Ham DJ

Favorite video game of all time. GO!

quartata

baldur's gate

zyabin101

@DrGreenEggsandHamDJ Idk. GO!

Sparr

9:04 PM

trying a new approach to Actually metagolf (damn you PPCG!)

this time I'm generating programs starting at the end

instead of at the beginning

zyabin101

facepalm It's not a game.

Dr Green Eggs and Ham DJ

@quartata I was 1 when that game came out. -_-

zyabin101

Well, except for those for whom every challenge is a game. :P

quartata

You can pick up the enhanced edition on Steam

mbomb007

Who on this site knows Excel VBA?

I need some help

Nathan Merrill

9:06 PM

Type erasure is pretty silly

zyabin101

I know Python.

Sparr

@quartata ever play Arcanum?

@mbomb007 you're in the wrong room. this is for puzzles, not general programming

quartata

BG1 is one of the few games I've probably sunk 1000+ hours into. i used to do all kinds of crazy stuff

mbomb007

@zyabin101 I do too. It's not helpful, because VBA is awful.

Nathan Merrill

I play Dota 2

but not as much recently

mbomb007

9:07 PM

I play League.

Nathan Merrill

and Civ 4

aditsu

@DrGreenEggsandHamDJ Go! (seriously)

mbomb007

And Civ V

Geobits

@Sparr The old Sierra game?

zyabin101

@aditsu GO!

mbomb007

9:07 PM

Not rly Civ V anymore

aditsu

although calling it a video game is a bit of a stretch

quartata

@Sparr I remember it but I have not played it

Dr Green Eggs and Ham DJ

Nathan Merrill

@mbomb007 still play Civ 4

Dr Green Eggs and Ham DJ

Like that one?

aditsu

9:08 PM

yep

Dr Green Eggs and Ham DJ

Not really a video game, but interesting choice.

aditsu

you can play it on the computer, with a graphical interface :p

Dr Green Eggs and Ham DJ

I've never played it enough to really understand the strategy, but I know it's one of the most complex strategy games of all time.

Like, way beyond chess.

quartata

@NathanMerrill Dota seems like the kind of game I'd like in theory, but damn do people take themselves wayy too seriously in it.

Nathan Merrill

I've trie a couple of times to get into Go, but I always feel like I have no idea where to play

Sparr

9:09 PM

my favorite computer game, which might count as a video game, was Overlord (in the same family as Lorenai, Eressea, Atlantis). play by email, open ended strategy

if I had money to hire devs to make one game, it would be a modern implementation of those games

aditsu

if anybody wants to play with me, feel free to ask anytime :p

Dr Green Eggs and Ham DJ

I'd play with you.

You'd probably kick my ass though.

Nathan Merrill

@quartata I actually think its related to the fact that its a team game

aditsu

I can give you handicap so we have even chances

Dr Green Eggs and Ham DJ

@mbomb007 A friend of mine is huge into league, and he keeps trying to get me into it. I've just never really found it fun.

I've had fun playing it, but 90% of the time it's just frustrating.

quartata

9:11 PM

Not really. I've played plenty of other multiplayer team games were people are perfectly chill

aditsu

I also like openttd

Nathan Merrill

@quartata examples?

Martin Büttner

o/ former Go player here... every other month I think I should get back into it, but then I remember how much time it takes to play actively enough to improve and then I decide to stick to PPCG instead o.O

mınxomaτ

@MartinBüttner Well, is there something like lichess for go? :D

quartata

Also Dota is kinda infuriating for me because it alternates between snail's pace and warpspeed

Martin Büttner

9:12 PM

@mınxomaτ What is lichess?

Doorknob

@MartinBüttner lichess.org

mınxomaτ

@MartinBüttner en.lichess.org

aditsu

@MartinBüttner you can choose to play fast games

Martin Büttner

then yes, KGS

but I never even played on KGS when I was active

Nathan Merrill

Go question: how much of go is "looking X moves ahead", and how much of it is identifying shapes/patterns?

aditsu

9:13 PM

KGS is my favorite server (there are several others too)

Doorknob

@aditsu Interestingly enough, although I'm bad at chess, I'm even worse at blitz/bullet. :P

Nathan Merrill

I know, super broad

Martin Büttner

@NathanMerrill depends on the part of the game

quartata

@NathanMerrill TF2, CS most of the time, GOIO (Guns of Icarus Online), ...

Martin Büttner

opening is a bit chess-like with common openings, although (as opposed to chess) they're all local.

Dr Green Eggs and Ham DJ

9:14 PM

@NathanMerrill I don't play go very much, but I've heard that the main reason computers suck at it is because looking x moves ahead doesn't help very much.

Martin Büttner

middle game is a lot of intuition in IMHO the hardest part of the game

Nathan Merrill

@quartata I'm not a huge fan of FPS, so it makes sense that I don't know anything about those communities :)

aditsu

@NathanMerrill it's a combination.. not sure about the percentages

Martin Büttner

the end game is all about counting and reading out lots of moves

quartata

Awesomenauts is another MOBA I used to really enjoy

Dr Green Eggs and Ham DJ

9:14 PM

blog.codinghorror.com/…

Nathan Merrill

@MartinBüttner what do you mean by local?

Dr Green Eggs and Ham DJ

interesting read from the BFDL (of SO)

Martin Büttner

@aditsu when I played actively, I only used OGS... I was never a fan of the "real-time" servers

aditsu

@MartinBüttner Go openings are not local (except maybe for beginners)

quartata

Those games were usually not very salty

Martin Büttner

9:15 PM

@NathanMerrill there are no full-board openings. the common opening patterns are usually confined to corners, so you can sort of have 4 openings playing out at once.

@aditsu josekis sure are

aditsu

nope, a lot of them depend on the positions in other corners, ladders, etc

side stones too

Nathan Merrill

@MartinBüttner right, I remember that when watching AlphaGo. They'd switch between different sections pretty frequently

Martin Büttner

@aditsu that's true, but I still think they're local patterns. which one is best may depend on the global board, but the patterns that people study and memorise are local.

you don't study full-board openings, at least not up to low amateur dan level

aditsu

ok, in that sense, you can say so

Bald Bantha

Jan 13 at 19:45, by ETHproductions

‭Alex A. ‮Alex A. ‭Alex A. ‮Alex A. ‭Alex A. ‮Alex A. ‭Alex A. ‮Alex A. ‭Alex A. ‮Alex A.

how does this work?

Nathan Merrill

9:17 PM

rtl character I believe

quartata

Unicode character for rendering right to left text

Nathan Merrill

Right-to-left mark

The right-to-left mark (RLM) is a non-printing character used in the computerized typesetting of bi-directional text containing mixed left-to-right scripts (such as English and Cyrillic) and right-to-left scripts (such as Persian, Arabic, Syriac and Hebrew). It is used to change the way adjacent characters are grouped with respect to text direction. == Unicode == In Unicode, the RLM character is encoded at U+200F RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK (HTML ‏ · &rlm;). In UTF-8 it is E2 80 8F. Usage is prescribed in the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm. == Example of use in HTML == Suppose the writer wishes...

aditsu

@MartinBüttner probably high amateur dan

quartata

It's for languages like Hebrew

Martin Büttner

@aditsu how actively do you play?

Nathan Merrill

9:18 PM

@quartata do you follow the dota scene at all?

aditsu

quite sporadically, I didn't play for about a year, then I started again when AlphaGo happened, then kinda stopped again :p

quartata

Not really. Used to when I was interested in it for a short time.

aditsu

but I was fairly active for several years

Bald Bantha

Collaborative editing can quickly become a textual rap battle fought with increasingly convoluted invocations of U+202a to U+202e.

2

aditsu

‏there's an xkcd for everything :p

Martin Büttner

9:21 PM

@aditsu yeah, I also played quite actively for about 2.5 years, and then stopped pretty abruptly when moving to London.

Nathan Merrill

did you guys play Go online?

Martin Büttner

I only used KGS (the "live" server) very occasionally, mainly for the national league, but I used OGS (one of the "turn-based" i.e. slow servers) quite a lot

orlp

I need to come up with a layout for my new keyboard

this is what I have so far

aditsu

bah my rtl is not working

orlp

still got some keys left over

Martin Büttner

9:22 PM

"turn-based server" is a stupid word for a turn-based game, but for some reason that's what the servers are called where game times are measured in weeks or months.

aditsu

@NathanMerrill yeah I play sometimes

orlp

I have a layer planned for programming symbols

Martin Büttner

I mostly played at the local Go club, with friends or at tournaments though

@orlp how do you switch between layers?

Bald Bantha

@orlp making one or what

orlp

@MartinBüttner the italic f keys

(look at the right hand thumb button)

a layer works like shift

aditsu

9:23 PM

I played a pro online a couple of times

orlp

but you can also make a layer work like caps-lock, or a 'latch', which acts as a layer only for the next keypress

Bald Bantha

time to mess with RTL in sandbox

Nathan Merrill

another Go question: are you able to tell the difference between two ranks that are both above you?

Martin Büttner

@aditsu nice. :) we had a Korean pro offer training sessions in Berlin which I did for a few months, so I got a chance to play a pro a couple of times there or so.

@NathanMerrill depends on how far apart and how close to you they are I guess ;)

orlp

@NathanMerrill I can't, but I'm too low ranked for that

aditsu

9:25 PM

oh cool

Nathan Merrill

@MartinBüttner er, you aren't playing them

Martin Büttner

I couldn't tell the difference between a 6d and a 7d but I could tell a 2d from a 7d

orlp

at my best I was ~15-18th kyu, but that was a while ago, pretty bad right now

(where 'my best' means I played for like a month or two)

Nathan Merrill

aka, if you saw two 3d playing each other and then two 7d, could you tell?

Martin Büttner

oh that's what you mean. I see. possibly. well not right now because I haven't played in over 4 years now, but when I was playing actively, I might have.

in direct comparison probably, but I don't think I would've been able to accurately guess the rank from a single game.

aditsu

9:26 PM

yeah you can generally tell when there's several ranks difference, and not too far above you

on KGS I can recognize 8d+ players by their magic

Nathan Merrill

I imagine that watching a 7d you would have a lot more "I have no idea why they did that" than 3d

aditsu

at 7d there are glimpses of magic

Martin Büttner

yeah this ^

Nathan Merrill

magic?

orlp

@NathanMerrill 'that should not happen'

'why did that work?'

Martin Büttner

9:30 PM

people at that level play some moves where you think "what was that for?" during the middle game and then a fair bit later on it all plays out nicely.

aditsu

sometimes a sequence of odd moves suddenly ends in killing a big group or gaining some other kind of advantage you didn't think was possible

mınxomaτ

This might be nice for scoring (some) image-processing challenges: github.com/google/butteraugli

Maltysen

@mınxomaτ hahaha I was watching that too

aditsu

or saving a group that you knew for sure was dead

Bald Bantha

ABCDEFGHIJKLM‮NOPQRSTUVWXYZ

Martin Büttner

9:32 PM

and then there's the art of playing ko...

Bald Bantha

copy paste that into chatbox and try to edit it ^^ loads of fun.

aditsu

ABCeditDEFGHIJKLM‮NOPQseems fineRSTUVWXYZ

Bald Bantha

see

I has borken chat

not the same thing as

16 mins ago, by Bald Bantha

Jan 13 at 19:45, by ETHproductions

‭Alex A. ‮Alex A. ‭Alex A. ‮Alex A. ‭Alex A. ‮Alex A. ‭Alex A. ‮Alex A. ‭Alex A. ‮Alex A.

aditsu

so, anybody wanna play now?

Nathan Merrill

how does the right to left character work when typing? Does your cursor start inserting characters to the right of it?

and then what happens if you switch back?

mbomb007

9:36 PM

Just found this:

geocities.jp/nchikada/pac

Someone made Pacman and Space Invaders in Excel

Bald Bantha

@NathanMerrill IDK paste in the thing and figure it out

Optimizer

excel is really powerful with vb

i have made programs that generate autocad and maya outputs

in excel

mınxomaτ

@mbomb007 I was wondering for a moment, because geocities ceased to exist a long time ago, but that's a different domain...

aditsu

I guess not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

mbomb007

@Optimizer Yeah, I know it's powerful. But I know VB.NET and I couldn't figure out how to do some (should be) simple VBA in a few hours. VBA is horrible and outdated.

mınxomaτ

9:41 PM

@mbomb007 I think you meant to ping the llama.

mbomb007

Maybe it's the built-in Excel IDE. That's awful, too.

Thx

Optimizer

maybe its just you who is not hipster enough?

Martin Büttner

@aditsu well I'm going to bed. ;) but maybe some other time, although I'd probably just embarrass myself :P

mbomb007

Every error I would get is useless and uninformative.

aditsu

@MartinBüttner what is/was your rank?

mbomb007

9:43 PM

Even the documentation is lacking.

Martin Büttner

I was somewhere around the mythical 1k/1d boundary, but with a huge difference in strength in different parts of the game. I could probably have taken up a 3d during the end game, but would struggle against a 2k during the middle game. given the Go etiquette of resigning when you're far behind, this made for really frustrating games, because I kinda had to keep playing even if I was 50 points behind, because I was often able to get them back during the end game.

aditsu

I did a little VBA many eons ago, I remember they had some kind of global variables that were subject to translation (so the same code failed in a different environment)

mbomb007

@MartinBüttner So you followed AlphaGo's games?

Martin Büttner

but that was more than 4 years ago, so right now my play style would probably be very weird, where I would still be able to play a lot of interesting tesujis but don't remember the most basic josekis...

aditsu

@MartinBüttner oh, I think I'm around 1d now, so you might not need much handicap, if any

Martin Büttner

9:46 PM

@mbomb007 sort of. I didn't watch the commentary in detail or anything, except for the last half hour of each game or so (because that was roughly when I got up)

@aditsu I'd definitely need handicap after 4 years :P ... I doubt I'd be better than 5k or something right now. I've definitely forgotten a lot.

what rank were you when you were really active?

aditsu

well, I progressed... from about 10k to 1k and sometimes 1d

on KGS only

mbomb007

It depends on who you play with. It can be fun with friends. I started having more fun once I got better at my favorite champions and got to the point where I can play any champ at a halfway decent level even if I've never played them before.

You really need to get out of "elo hell" and do ranked games (if you think winning is more fun). People try harder in ranked. If you can have fun in losing, then normals are fine.

Martin Büttner

ah okay... well I've definitely regressed :P

mbomb007

@MartinBüttner Do you play Chess at all?

Martin Büttner

not really. I played for a year or so in a club as a kid, because my dad's a fairly active chess player, but I never enjoyed it as much.

mbomb007

9:50 PM

@DrGreenEggsandHamDJ Honestly though, the best thing to do is get really good at one or two champs for each role.

Martin Büttner

I find Go a lot more interesting because most of its complexity is emergent whereas chess comes with quite a lot rules.

Nathan Merrill

@mbomb007 I don't enjoy the fact that giving up is a thing in League

aditsu

@MartinBüttner regressed when you were really active? :o

mbomb007

@NathanMerrill I don't give up.

Martin Büttner

@aditsu no, since then :P

mbomb007

9:51 PM

It's only the people who have a losing mentality from the start that give up.

Nathan Merrill

@mbomb007 that doesn't stop the enemy or my teammates

mbomb007

@NathanMerrill Maybe not, but it starts with you. I've won 4v5 before.

I've even nearly won a 3v5.

People quit when their team is behind in kills. But that's nothing. Objectives are towers and drag and baron. Those matter much more than kills in many cases.

Rainbolt

I dressed up nice today and today is wear your company shirt day :(

mbomb007

@NathanMerrill But yeah, I don't like it when ppl give up so early either. They just have no patience and they get angry and tilted easily.

It's indicative of today's culture.

People swear, insult, and generally bully others to make themselves feel just a bit higher and mightier.

Rainbolt

It's indicative of today's Internet culture.

mbomb007

9:55 PM

@Rainbolt Not only. People are like that in-person as well.

Rainbolt

I have never had someone on my team in real life bully or insult me to nearly the same degree that I have been bullied or insulted while playing DotA, HoN, or Halo

I'm not sure it has happened at all in real life, which is why I merely said "to the same degree".

mbomb007

@QPaysTaxes Sure, people are more willing to type it than say it, but the feels are always there, even if they come out less in person.

Rainbolt

As far as swearing goes, I am guilty. I swear a lot in voice chat.

Nathan Merrill

@mbomb007 I was actually talking about surrendering

mbomb007

I'm talking not about your ski patrollers. I'm talking about people in general.

Just go look at the homosexuality/transgender bathroom debates on the news.

Nathan Merrill

9:58 PM