Ugh. After visiting four purported sporting/fitness goods stores and two department stores, I've seen approx 1000 models of treadmills, steppers, bikes, ellipticals, and ineffective-looking "ab-crunchers". Not a single damn one carries rowing machines.
I guess I should've just followed my first instinct and ordered one online. What a waste of time.
Calculate the angle between clock hands
Write a program or a function that takes a number of hours and a number of minutes as input (stdin, parameter,...) and returns (or prints) the degrees in the angle between the hour hand and the minute hand.
Rules:
You can write a working program or a fu...
@Doorknob You changed the number of trials from 10 to 3? That seems quite punishing to submissions like FoolMeOnce (which was posted before your rule change)
Find the mines!
Tags: (code-challenge or king-of-the-hill?) algorithm
You are a mine remover. Your job is to find all mines on a field, without a mine explodes. So, you write an application that can find the mines carefully.
The input
The input can either be provided through command line argu...
I recently noticed that on many popularity contests the earlier answers get more upvotes than the ones that were submitted later. This effect is - I think - amplified by arranging the answers so that the most upvoted answers are displayed on top. On the one hand later submissions can use idea of ...
@Geobits I thought about this a lot recently... I haven't looked into any statistics, but I still wonder how reliable they are... are people actually comparing number of trips taken vs fatal incident for each method of transportation? because obviously less people die in plane crashes, but there also a lot less plane journeys undertaken.
It all depends on whether you evaluate per-trip, per-mile, per-hour, etc. I think planes are still safer by about any metric, but the exact number changes by what you measure.
@Geobits So airtravel is just safer because you can get further with less journeys. But just making a journey with a car is stastically less likely to get killed than stepping on a plane. (which I guess is due to the car thing counting loads of trips to the supermarket around the corner)
I'm pretty sure the earth's speed is negligible compared to a shuttle's speed
personally I like to measure everything relative to the sun, that way I can treat any discrepancy in death/km as negligible and everything is really safe.
I think that a space shuttle in space and a human on the earth are not very comparable in terms of velocity
On earth, we move by travelling or just by rotating around. The earth moves around the sun. The sun moves around the center of the milky way. And the milky way is probably floating as well.
I think standing still is pretty safe, so maybe it's the safest way to travel?
@ProgramFOX That asked for an optimal solution, right?
Are you sure an optimal solution would take too long to compete in your challenge? (Because otherwise, a code challenge doesn't actually make sense anyway if all submissions can be optimal)
If your challenge cannot be solved with an optimal algorithm, then your challenge is not a duplicate I'd say, because you can't reuse answers from the code golf for your own.
no but you could have a statistically optimal algorithm
the question is whether it's feasible to actually analyse the odds of every single move. if that's the case, I think that's a problem with your challenge.
That's your choice. You can either put all flags at once, or analyse every single move. The former is better for your count of steps, but that's just a tie breaker.
But if it's possible to post a statistically optimal algorithm, than the leaderboard boils down to luck.
ah, hi @PeterTaylor. after our discussion yesterday, I'd value your 2 cents (pence?) on this: meta.codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/1876/8478 (even if it results in a downvote ;))
@ProgramFOX what I'm saying is, if you can post an optimal algorithm, why would anyone post a suboptimal algorithm? in particular, you'll certainly get multiple optimal submissions, and then their actual order will depend on luck.
it didn't actually break the challenge, but I had hoped to see a bunch of really cool heuristic solutions and didn't get a single one, because the first one was optimal
so I just got two better optimal solutions with less bugs and less memory/time consumption
I'm with Tyzoid, although I also upvoted dmckee way back when. I don't think having two questions which differ only in their scoring system is very interesting. I would rather see few questions but all of them very different to each other than a bunch of variations on a theme.
@PeterTaylor hm, fair enough. But regardless of whether it's interesting to reuse the same theme or not, wouldn't you at least agree that a fastest-code and code-golf on the same theme do (/can) make for entirely different challenges?
@MartinBüttner They can do, but I'm not convinced they would do in the majority of cases. Both of them ultimately come down to exploring the set of possible implementations. To be genuinely different challenges the different criteria would need to push you in different directions in terms of understanding the underlying structure of the problem.
And really I think the best solution is to write code golf questions with performance constraints which rule out pure brute force approaches.
@PeterTaylor wow, I've been avoiding the phrase "in future" like the plague (in favour of "in the future") because I thought it was a false friend
speaking of false friends, this is amazing: the English Wikipedia article lists as the first example "embarazada" which (as you probably know) is actually Spanish for "pregnant". The funny thing about that is that "pregnant" is a similarly embarrassing false friend for Germans, because "prägnant" means "concise" or "succinct". :D
It seems (on a quick glance at COCA and BNC) to be more common in British English than American, but fairly common in both. Although there is the confounding factor of the structure "in future <noun>", which I didn't try to rule out.
@MartinBüttner That is a classic source of mistakes. The classic one in the other direction is that the English word "constipated" refers to excretory problems, whereas the Spanish "constipado" refers to nasal problems, so Spanish-speakers looking for cold medicine in an English-speaking country sometimes end up with laxatives instead.
are English people even generally aware of the common mistakes speaker from other nations unless they learnt that language themselves?
like, the classic German one is "Can I become a hamburger?"
(which every German knows)
in fact, I can't even think of a common mistake English people make in German (which might also be due to the fact that I don't know a lot of English people who can speak German)
On closer examination, the COCA results do seem to be almost exclusively "in future <noun>".
@MartinBüttner I don't think so, except possibly elements of accent or grammar which are used to stereotype. (E.g. Germans pronouncing W as we pronounce V, or Russians not using the word "the").
well that still means I can use it regularly, because I tend to (try to) speak British English.... and even if I'm talking with American friends, I'm usually not trying to switch to an American dialect... I think that can only go wrong if I try to speak two different dialects of a foreign language :D
That being said, I've heard within Belgium the dialects differ so much you have a hard time understanding the local dialect 50km away (of course, unless you're trying to communicate with each other).
Reminds me of the diffs in Visual Studio, where it desperately tries to piece together all the curly brackets that didn't change and ends up looking like you sent your code through a shredder
@overactor To be honest, I've met only 3 Americans you actually ever tried to learn German properly (all of them living in Germany for a while), and their German was insanely good. Two of them don't have the slightest accent, and you only notice the odd unusual phrasing. And the third is almost as good.
@Rainbolt it's even funnier when the last word of the previous paragraph appears in the the deleted one ;)
@overactor Yeah, I'm pretty sure those people I mentioned are the exception. I'm just saying that I never happened to meet an American who tried but wasn't amazing :D ... but I also never met an American who had just arrived in Germany to stay there for a while.
@MartinBüttner I learned quite a bit of German living there as a kid (age 6-10), but that's all gone now. I can count and remember simple words, but that's about it.
@Geobits There's this (British) dude in my course who lived all his live in Germany, but basically doesn't speak German at all, because he spent all his live in this English-speaking military community.
Yea, I knew some guys in Japan who were the same way. Never made sense to me.
I remember living in Morbach as a kid, we rented an apartment over a local barber shop. The old lady who ran the shop used to invite us over after school to try to fatten us up. Didn't speak a word of English :)
Mid-pack, not bad. I would like to attempt to find a good mixed strategy by genetic optimisation, but I don't know whether it will make it up my priority list. I'm currently mainly focussed on a mathematical analysis of codegolf.stackexchange.com/q/31673/194 ; I want to at least get a reasonably tight asymptotic bound in the hope of writing a publishable paper about the problem.
@Rainbolt and he's doing two KotHs at the same time ^^
I guess the caveman thing is just generally a bit simpler, and at 100 rounds (and with the different rules) doesn't have such a massive runtime as yours.
The runtime for mine was three days straight, but that was the easy part. The hard part was compiling the entries, which he seems to be very on top of.
FWIW I have no interest in astrology whatsoever - Astronomy is much more up my alley. But I thought this might be a quick, easy challenge to perhaps get newer users started/ draw attention to the site, or whatever
@MartinBüttner Yes. I've managed to prove the link to partitions, and I've been doing a lot of reading to see whether anyone's studied iterative partition sums before, but if so it's very marginal to the main study of partitions. I've calculated the first 60 terms (which took a long time, because beyond about 54 you have to start thinking about using disk for your working space), looked hard for recurrences, and bounded the growth to within a factor of n^-0.5.
I'm hoping to narrow that a shade and maybe come up with some reasonable conjectures to set a roadmap for future research. Always looks good when you're trying to publish ;)
huh, interesting... how did that spark a paper? from the math.SE post I get the impression it was a pretty straightforward manipulation (and I didn't see any discussion in the comments leading to further thoughts)
Calculate the angle between clock hands
Write a program or a function that takes a number of hours and a number of minutes as input (stdin, parameter,...) and returns (or prints) the degrees in the angle between the hour hand and the minute hand.
Rules:
You can write a working program or a fu...
Find the mines!
Tags: (code-challenge or king-of-the-hill?) algorithm
You are a mine remover. Your job is to find all mines on a field, without a mine explodes. So, you write an application that can find the mines carefully.
The input
The input can either be provided through command line argu...
