i had the idea of making it like a robber and cop challenge, you can submit a 'cat' or a 'catcher', but the problem was determining whether there is an optimal solution that you could bruteforce
now i had another idea: again robber and cop: but this time you just try to catch the cat (the cat cannot escape anyhow) but you have to do it in as few steps as possible
so the cat is always on the board, that means eithe ryou have 'walls' or we use a torroidal topology
@Sp3000 you can force re-evaluation of zero-width patterns with {n}, but that only gives you up to n repetitions. I need to find a way to have no limit at all
How would scoring be handled? Run every combination of cat and catcher, with the scores being the sum of times? Cats want to maximize their time, while robbers want to minimize it?
@Sp3000 well, the patterns obviously :P ... basically I want to find a way to do an arbitrary amount of stack shifting without consuming any characters of the input
the stuff after it is to ensure that a) something has been executed (i.e. the first alternative, which pushes something onto <z>), but also that the stacks <a>, <b>, <c> are empty (which means that the other parts of the repetition also have to be run, so I get to shift the stacks around until they are empty)
you just cannot read python if you come from any other language....
one last question: does anyone know a recommendable git tutorial? I have never used git so far, only used svn once for a project but never really understood all the commands=)
you really won't have any trouble with checking the first few copies of the snippet for correctness (by simply terminating execution after a second or so)
and if those work out, I'm sure you can prove correctness manually
@randomra if you check the link, BF busy-beavers don't grow that fast, so if a short program doesn't terminate within half a second or so, you can be certain that it doesn't halt at all
