@MartinBüttner Why'd you have to go and get publicist? Once this reached 10k views we we're supposed to be tied with 9 gold apiece and I might have had the only chance anyone on this site could ever have to surpass you in a badge count XD
@Calvin'sHobbies I don't believe in getting 12 yet. ;)
Also, you regularly manage good questions, which usually give multiple gold at one, while I tend to get my gold from answers (which usually just gives one)
@trichoplax Hahaha, here on PPCG there are two opposing factions, the Calvinists who ask questions and the Martinists who answer them. (No religious offence intended, that's just a really funny coincidence.)
The regex you posted is is not the same as that in the tester. Obviously, if you don't repeat the lookahead it only checks the beginning of the string.
@MartinBüttner interesting.. will solutions be posted?
@MartinBüttner or should we add it as a PPCG challenge :)
oh... programming question.. :)
I have to autograde work.. they are supposed to write to standard out but some write to files. Is there some clever way to redirect all output to standard out?
short of running the whole thing in a virtual machine.. well I might have to do that
I've been trying for weeks to come up with an answer-dependent challenge based on the theme of Chinese Whispers... with no luck...
(like either processing the previous answer's output, or basing your code on the previous answer's output, but I haven't found anything that would work well)
I must be very close to hitting the serial downvote reversal for a user on LifeHacks. I'm having to consciously think about whether or not to downvote now (based on the user, not the post), which shouldn't be the case :(
The Jigsaw Code Puzzle
source-layout
This is an answer-dependent challenge! The order of answers matters, and your exact task depends on the last answer that was posted.
Let's piece together some code! Here are 1960 random (printable ASCII) characters. Think of them as a big heap of unsort...
Mostly they just look like they're from an external source without attribution. Very many self-answers that way, as in "browse a lifehacking site and scrape stuff to farm rep". Mostly one-liners with a meme-ish picture attached.
@Sp3000 should I? with the no-language-twice restriction I was hoping it wouldn't matter.
I could though
currently each character appears about 21 times
okay, my other idea is a CnR, which will probably supersede my Haystack proposal from a couple of months ago. I'd like some feedback though before I write it up.
well, there are a few ways to do this, and I don't want to include the cartesian product of all option in the sandbox post, so I thought I might be able to rule a few things out before I write it up in detail
the idea is basically that the cops design word search puzzles with code (which the robbers have to solve). the clue for the programs in the word search will be their outputs (as it was for Unscramble the Source). the score would be the size of the word search.
the main questions are:
1. Do the cops choose the number of codes to find or is it prescribed? In the former case, how does this factor into the score? In the latter case, what's a good number? 2. Do all codes output the same, or will there be one clue per snippet? (I tend to the former.) 3. Do all codes have to be in the same language, all in different languages or could the cop specify "1 Python, 1 Ruby, 2 CJam"?
You are placed in a grid with no wrapping. You start on your "base", and you must step on every other square on the grid. Each step drains your "battery" 1%. By stepping on your base, you recharge your battery completely
well the optimal solution would be partition the grid into groups of 100 cells, which have the minimum possible overlap around the base, and then find a hamiltonian path for each.
@feersum @Geobits for the CnR ... with a Boggle board, I'm afraid it will be really tough for the cops to ensure that there aren't unintended solutions somewhere in the grid.
With a concerted effort, you could beat him. You just need enough people to post 998/997/996. The problem then is that most likely the one that posts 1 will win ;)
I don't think a single 998 would do it, because there's already a 990, and it's in second place.
Otherwise someone could just design a board with programs in 25 super obscure languages, which would require a single robber to learn all of those languages.
@feersum I was thinking about allowing the program to be any rectangular slice from the floor, but that would make it really trivial until the grid gets dense.
or rather, it would then be really important to incentivise using fewer pieces
it's probably similar for the robbers, except they have to find code in particular language with given output. I don't like that it's similar to CH's challenge, but feersum and Geobits convinced that there's no point in making it a word search
(which wouldn't really have been that different either)
Hide your code in a Boggle board!
cops-and-robberscode-golfboggle
This proposal is intended to supersede my earlier proposal Find the Needle in the Haystack, of which I'm not convinced any more that it would work very well. I'll keep both proposals around for now, though.
The Cops' Challen...
haha, I'm looking forward to the robbers' thread being closed and the cops' thread remaining open... then the cops' thread will be closed as "too broad" because any submission will be valid, as there is no place to crack them :D
Eh, I think the robber isn't really a dupe anyway. Finding programs that give a certain output is different than finding a string to give arbitrarily big output.
Print out the first N characters of your code
You should write a program or function that receives a positive integer N as input and prints out the first N characters of your code. If N is larger than the length of your code you should continue output your code cyclically.
Examples
(assuming y...
Oh! I see. So you'd be stuck hunting through every piece of source code to work out the output file?
I know you probably don't have this option, but I'd be tempted to send it back saying "You have zero so far, but if you fix it to output to stdout then I'll grade it"
The Jigsaw Code Puzzle
source-layout
This is an answer-dependent challenge! The order of answers matters, and your exact task depends on the last answer that was posted.
Let's piece together some code! Here are 1960 random (printable ASCII) characters. Think of them as a big heap of unsort...
Print out the first N characters of your code
You should write a program or function that receives a positive integer N as input and prints out the first N characters of your code. If N is larger than the length of your code you should continue output your code cyclically.
Examples
(assuming y...
