Guys whats is the word for being more sparse with something

It's on the tip of my tongue but I can't think of what it is

The strong silent type would be ____ with his words.

That's good but it's not the word lol

Someone read my mind please

Prudent?

parsimonious? sparing?

Sparing's what I was trying to think of :P

Sparing! That's what I was looking for

I was close with sparse

I thought you were thinking of sparing only because of its small distance to 'sparse'

What is the subset-sum method for palyomino? i never understood that comment

@feersum Well you can basically run subset sum twice to assign directions to the individual rods. First you find all subsets that give you equal total lengths. You make that subset horizontal, and all remaining rods vertical. And then for both of the sets, you find all subsets with exactly half the length, and assign them to up/right. And then you just need to check if the resulting arrangement is a valid polyomino.

The advantage would be that subset sum has a search space of 2^n instead of 3^n

But how long would subset sum take to run?

but in the end it might be much easier to truncate the search space with the backtracking you already have so that the better complexity doesn't outweigh it.

'equal total lengths' means what?

(Finally got blur working :/ Took ages because I kept mixing up rows and columns)

well split the set into two groups whose rod lengths sum to the same number. because you need to go as far down as you went up (or as far left as you went right)

@Sp3000 looking forward to it :)

I see. One subset is up+right while the other is down+left

or vice versa

It creates isolated cells though so I'll need to do a second pass of some of the previous steps

It would be worthwhile if that succeeds in detecting 0-solution sets

@feersum ummm... that's an option as well :D

I meant you run a first pass to split the rods up into horizontal/vertical

how does that make sense?

and then for each such split, for each group, you separate the rods into halves of equal length

number of horizontal does not need to equal number of vertical

no it doesn't

the first pass is to find all splits into two groups of even sum

the second pass, for each of those splits, halves both groups into parts of equal length

It seems almost impossible to use this information while laying down rods in order one by one

still the 0 thing would be huge

well you're not laying them down 1-by-1 any more

i don't know how else to do it

is this really the cause of 0 solutions though?

well the two passes of subset sum give you an assignment of UDLR to each rod, and it already guarantees that the loop is closed. then you only need to check for counter-clockwise traversal and that there's no self-intersection

putting together a subset sum solution with a bunch of 1,2,3 and 4 seems should be easy

Rainbolt you are snowy today

Hello everyone

@TheDoctor he refuses to change his name to Snowbolt though, which makes all of us very sad. :(

lol

How would one make a snowy doge avatar...

like this?

Yeah, but thats just kinda fuzzed out

You do this, but with blue.

disturbing

D:

lol

also, check ths out: ytcracker.com/v2014

I thnk its javascript

@Rainbolt I hope you can still sleep well...

What link do I need to click on to understand what you just said?

you need to look at the sidebar

It isn't Christmas yet.

I have two Christmas presents coming for you: a name change and complete destruction of every Tips post on the entire site.

I'm looking forward to both of them ;)

Hm? What's happening with Tips posts?

They are getting destroyed when we graduate next month.

Jan 1, can't wait!

@Rainbolt what does the second one mean ?

oh!

why will they get destroyed though ?

:(

Read this over: meta.codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/3566 It explains the graduation date and tips issue.

Our community moderator, Nace Grote, said they weren't a good fit for the Stack Exchange format.

page not found

But the whole site is an abuse of Stack Exchange!

also what's the icon? I want to know what a picture of a code golf looks like.

@Geobits :)

page not found only to me ?

That's odd.

not founded to me

Same here, is there a rep barrier?

@Optimizer works for me. you should also see it on the front page of meta though.

nope

Yeah I don't see it... what's it called?

strange

@feersum Haven't seen the icon yet, I assume the SE artist (Jin?) is working on it.

I always imagine someone hitting a computer monitor with a golf club

I found it:

just "PPCG Graduation and Tips Questions"

I... don't see it

maybe a caching problem

no

I think he means he can't understand what he is looking at.

no

I think Optimizer is stuck

Looks like a 5 wood to me.

no

holds down power button on Optimizer for ten seconds

nooooo

don't kill me

Soooo my company had a celebration dinner last night and I was asked to bring a date

Was your fun-loving, ultra-liberal CEO there? :P

Hmmm yeah still page not found (even on FF)

Yes, along with my entire team, and the testers that test our product, and the VP of operations, and the project manager

So how'd that go?

yes

Better than I thought. Nobody even flinched when I introduced him as my partner.

And they included him in conversation so that was nice

are u he or she ?

Nice. I guess people don't suck as much as I imagine.

We were going to move to Austin, TX next semester, but after last night we decided to stay

@Optimizer He

ok

Goes to show that employee appreciation is key to retaining your employees

that's really nice :)

Hmmm

I sure could go for some of that employee appreciation right about now.

I hate it when my pen runs out, and I need to switch to another one with a different balance, and suddenly I really suck at pen spinning...

If the labor market around here was better I'd probably be somewhere else by now.

What do you do again?

Your profile: "Not much to say here at the moment. Maybe later."

@MartinBüttner I have tried for hours to do that. You people amaze me with your pen spinning skills.

Right now my main project is a phonegap (ugh) app for field work/maintenance management.

Freelance, small company, or big company?

I'm not even that good... but the few things I can do tend to work well enough to do them unconsciously while thinking or being bored... until I need to change my pen...

City

Oh, so you work for the government?

Small "company", though, in terms of team/department size. Very small.

Did you know that TFS is free for 5 people or less?

I highly recommend it

@MartinBüttner i prefer allen wrench spinning

@TheDoctor I don't use those to write though.

Nothing we do is in VS, so TFS would seem a bit of an odd move. Though I haven't looked into it much, I assume it's main feature is easy integration with VS.

Lol yeah i picked it up in robotics since we have so many allen wrenches lying around

@Geobits marketplace.eclipse.org/content/tfs-plug-eclipse#.VIhuozHF968

I shouldn't endorse that though. I haven't actually used it.

I'm sure Github is the way to go for Java teams

Interesting. I might look into it. Sad to say, though, it might be fighting a losing battle either way. The practices used here aren't so much "practices" as much as "just do your work and we'll throw it together later".

Github would be a nice step up from CVS, for sure :(

Or Samba

@Geobits I like "just do your work and we'll throw it together later" when I am working alone.

xkcd is funny today

Sure, when working alone :)

@TheDoctor the best recent thing from xkcd was the trolley problem and alternate universe what if

I wasn't a fan of the alternate universe what-if. Trolley yes.

Regarding trollies in general... yes, I pull the lever (in most versions...).

no

Somebody needs to flip Optimizer out of binary mode.

no

0

echo "ascii mode" > Optimizer.conf

starts moving thumb towards the reset button a second time

no

no

Did anyone else's Dad do the claw?

?

likes(mary, wine).
likes(john, wine).
?- likes(mary, X), likes(john, X).

Bruce does the claw in Bruce Almighty IIRC

In the interests of sowing confusion: The Claw

can ne1 take prnt scrn of that meta post ?

Optimizer was supposed to return wine :( But yes I'd be interested too :P

yes

hi again

no

Oh, username change?

I know!

it's exciting :)

:D

@MartinBüttner Compare the pair: A B

still no comments or votes on my question :(

how do I get my question added to the main list at meta.codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/2140/… ?

Which one?

Oh, if you can edit the OP post you can do that

(Right, sandbox question)

If not, propose an edit and it'll get approved.

@Sp3000 the blurry one makes my eyes hurt

the edit option is greyed out for me

Hmm, weird. I assumed you could at least propose one.

sadly no

I am not important enough :)

Maybe @MartinBüttner The blurry version gets turned into the clearer version :D I didn't believe that box blur converged to Gaussian but apparently it does

@Lembik done

@Geobits thanks!

@Geobits now you can tell me what you think of the question too :)

First thing I noticed: If the score is simply the highest n with no time limit, you can basically win by having a bunch of CPU time at your disposal, no?

screenshot ne1?

no

yes

maybe

= binary 0.5

no

ah, finally off the phone.

I also cannot find it on meta using the string "Graduation"

Anyone with lower rep than me who is able to see the post ?

Screenshot?

eff u

???

Optimizer and I can't see this meta post and we're wondering why

@Geobits oh was that for me?

@Geobits this is only sort of true. First. it is slightly non-trivial to write correct code at all. Second, the most naive method will be billions of times slower than a clever method

@Geobits so if you have 10 times more cpu power it won't help much if you have a worse method

@Geobits but if you have billion times more it might :)

it's very simple. you have to set a time limit.

@feersum sorry is that for me?

yes

Once a "good enough" method is posted though, it just boils down to whoever can run it the longest.

@Sp3000 neither can i...

@Geobits it's not quite true... see codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/41021/…

@Lembik it's not like you'll have one naive and one clever submission. you'll get a bunch of clever submissions, and they might not be that many orders of magnitude apart.

@MartinBüttner maybe.. take a look at codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/26459/… too

both those cases worked well

the second one had a time limit

but the first didn't

Why can't you have rules like this one?

I am not sure the time limit was really needed

@feersum that's what my second example did

but see the other one.. no time limit and no problem

basically, people all have roughly the same cpu time to within a factor of 10

That depends very much on the question though

and the algorithm choice makes a bigger difference than that

yes

I claim it is true for this one :)

I wrote all three of the questions we are talking about

Ahaha k, well polyominoes needs its time limit because running time is dependent on input

questions should ask for a program, not a number

ah ok

i spot a melon!

@feersum true.. I hope it is implied that the code is required!

@TheDoctor ? :)

@VisualMelon arrived

I can add a time limit if people think it is important.. the problem is then people don't get to post their score until I have run their code

which is less fun

@Lembik I don't see how that's a problem.

They can post an approximate score

@MartinBüttner true

like Sp3000 and feersum did for polyominoes

and that was reasonably accurate

so is the consensus that you would like me to post a time limit? And if I do, do you all agree to try the question? :-D

(Maybe I should post what I had and pray Martin's computer is faster for N=19 :P ... cbf though)

still, it turned out that feersum's machine was about 1.5 times faster than mine, whereas Sp3000's was about the same, so comparing the scores they obtained themselves wouldn't really have been fair