The Nineteenth Byte

Sp3000

00:11

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00:29

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A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Make a Modem! audio code-challenge Objective Design a modulator/demodulator pair. The modulator converts X bytes of random data to an audio file. The audio file will be run through a Python script that dirties it up like it went through plain old telephone service (POTS) and returns another au...

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00:45

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A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Simulate a Game of Quagmire Many moons ago, in a galaxy much like our own, a young BrainSteel attempted to invent a board game. He believed that he, too, could find an amazingly simple set of rules that would generate wonderfully strategic gameplay. He drew up the first set of rules--it looked p...

PhiNotPi

01:39

I'm currently trying to do some testing of the Red vs. Blue challenge.

I think something is buggy somewhere.

here's my testing bot: meta.codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/4963/2867

It should theoretically move towards an enemy.

But something about its homing is broken.

It appears to be homing up and down, but not left to right.

@Calvin'sHobbies My bot doesn't seem to work right now.

BrainSteel

On that note, my simple "return 4;" should make my bot move downward, right? It seems to be rather immobile.

PhiNotPi

Yeah.

BrainSteel

01:55

It appears to be reading the code correctly, but something is odd in execution.

PhiNotPi

@Calvin'sHobbies Which corner is (0,0) also?

I think I have the y-axis swapped.

Calvin's Hobbies

Top left is (0, 0)

BrainSteel

Ah, nevermind, I see you've edited my answer. Disregard me.

Calvin's Hobbies

Was return 4 really not working?

BrainSteel

I don't know if I ran the test before or after you edited it. It probably would've been pretty close. Worth checking, at least.

Calvin's Hobbies

01:59

I made me return 4 and it works

BrainSteel

Yeah, I must've ran it too late. False alarm.

PhiNotPi

Okay, try the latest edit of my bot.

It appears functional, at least in the single test or two I've tried.

Calvin's Hobbies

@PhiNotPi I just did. It took out BrainSteel when he was homing in.

Did it again

By the way, to help debug you can check the checkbox at the bottom of the snippet and look at your browser console.

PhiNotPi

Is the top-left (0,0) in the spec?

BrainSteel

I'm curious as to what a bunch of PhiNotPi's solutions look like pitted against each other.

PhiNotPi

02:05

Stalemate occurs, I believe.

Calvin's Hobbies

I'm not sure I specify where (0,0) is. I should though

PhiNotPi

Have you decided anything about asymmetrical move patterns?

Calvin's Hobbies

Yeah, I'll do the second thing you suggested. Red goes L/R, Blue U/D, both go diagonally.

I'll also make still moves impossible. If a player tries to move off the grid (or errors) they will be moved randomly to one of their 6 move choices.

But I probably won't getaround to it until tomorrow

PhiNotPi

02:27

One thing I'm noticing is that the game doesn't play well on a sparse field.

Maybe the time-limit to board-size ratio is too small.

By this, I'm referring to the distance a pixel can travel in a game vs. the length of a game.

I think I've seen predator-prey simulations like this before, and the environment is much smaller, denser, and action-packed.

On the other hand, there's only five test bots.

But still, more often than not, all the bots start completely isolated from each other.

Calvin's Hobbies

I could decrease the grid size, or make games longer. (Note that the players are drawn as 3x3 squares just so they are more visible. They are really 1x1 as the spec says.)

I wasn't really sure what to choose for those kind of values.

PhiNotPi

I'm going to go to sleep right about now, but try seeing what a 128x128 board looks like.

Bye!

Sp3000

05:00

Hmm shift-reduce conflicts. Fun.

Does anyone happen to know the grammar for regex char classes?

Martin Büttner

that really depends on the flavour, no?

Sp3000

Hm... that's true. Most of them seem to have similar behaviours for char classes though I think (barring ECMAScript)

Sp3000

05:15

Hmm interesting... a{5}? is valid in Python, but the ? isn't optional, it's lazy matching

Zgarb

07:32

@Calvin'sHobbies I had the same problem with my grid-routing battle. The grid was initially too large for the bots, and no-one scored any points. I had to shrink it after a while, which broke a couple of submissions. I also recommend that you make the board smaller.

Optimizer

10:39

some new wild game has appeared

StackEgg

start playing guys and lead our SE to top

codegolf.stackexchange.com/stackegg/leaderboard

stop doing nothing

people are downvoting on an simulation public beta too!

much realism

someone is like constantly downvoting ! must be a CJam hater !

lets not worry about quality and be like puzzling , eh ? :D

Peter Taylor

10:56

@Optimizer, did you forget to take your meds today?

grc

can we raid other sites and force them to restart?

3

Sp3000

If only graduation was actually this easy

grc

PPCG version: 1523 days have elapsed – your Site is in public beta.

PhiNotPi

We just graduated, again.

VisualMelon

StackEgg KOTH anyone?

PhiNotPi

11:09

I can feel it.

grc

I've checked and we could restart both puzzling and security :D

PhiNotPi

There will be raiding.

grc

anyone up for a puzzling raid?

VisualMelon

that's just not cricket

Optimizer

oh damn, we already graduated

<3 you guys!

at least we can graduate in a game !

i'm up for puzzling

grc

11:16

haha nice

Optimizer

LOL

grc

should we use a flag?

Optimizer

damn them low stats

flag gives 1 overall

we are at better

the number of users playing the game dropped

does it simply take the highest voted thing per round and then do that one thing only ?

or it does X things where X are the number of votes

grc

only the most voted

click the question mark in the top right

Optimizer

yeah, it was too long

grc

11:24

I wonder if it's better to built stats up one by one

Optimizer

they are all inter dependent

so one by one wont be easy

but we do need quality and answers first to get traffic going

so lets focus on those two for now ?

VisualMelon

close before asking? does that sound like a sensible policy?

Optimizer

of course it will make questions red in between, which we will take care

VisualMelon

would it be worth spending a flag to get some traffic going?

(when we can)

Optimizer

can it fill traffic ?

but pretty sure we will get it to 0 back again

we are not going anywhere right now ...

grc

11:28

what about building up questions, since it doesn't depend on anything else

Optimizer

quality will start sohwing red

but yeah, we can try

Zgarb

Questions are also needed for answers, so building questions would make sense.

Optimizer

okay, lets build it up till 3 and try to maintain it there

i'm heading out for a while

(or in game terms, for a couple of months)

grc

bye

PhiNotPi

I'm back.

Is a raid going to happen?

grc

11:39

we did one

VisualMelon

we seem to be holding 5th place fairly well

grc

I'm not sure how often the leaderboards update

VisualMelon

ah

PhiNotPi

I wonder what the underlying mechanics are.

grc

not sure, but since we've overtaken SO in hearts we've been gaining on SO in progress

in fact we've just overtaken SO

VisualMelon

11:51

no, we are in 6th place!

grc

leaderboards aren't sorted by progress

I don't think

PhiNotPi

We have a close-voter, it seems.

grc

@VisualMelon puzzling are third and we raided them earlier

PhiNotPi

If we knew which button caused exactly what effects (on the internal game state), we could create a game strategy.

Doorknob

PPCG challenge: "Build a StackEgg bot"

PhiNotPi

11:55

I can see that happening.

grc

haha I just reset security.se by myself :D

Doorknob

psshhh, mods don't get binding votes. So unrealistic. :P

Optimizer

wow, stats went haywire while i was gone

how many years it has been ?

grc

we has a traffic :D

Doorknob

:D

grc

12:03

must be a code-trolling question

2

Doorknob

hahaha, now we have to expect a big dip in quality

Optimizer

after few months (minutes)

don't worry, underhanded will take over

Doorknob

can we raid SF? :P

Optimizer

SF?

grc

give me a sec to create an account first

Optimizer

12:06

me too

Doorknob

awww, they rejected it 40% to 60%

Optimizer

try again

grc

:D

Optimizer

so in theory PPCG should have badass stats

Doorknob

we did it! :P

grc

12:08

it's a pity the sites don't get kills

Optimizer

almost full

what the hell

oh martin has come online, quality will increase

2

damn, it actually decreased

Doorknob

quality will now decrease!

reverse psychology

Zgarb

Maybe the code-trolling finally kicked in.

Optimizer

this is too meta

all full!

PhiNotPi

I just collected some stats for the past 10min or so of play.

grc

12:13

we might win this

Doorknob

Why is SF still at #1 on the leaderboard after being reset (I wonder how that happened)?

grc

lots of them have been reset

I think leaderboard is by time taken to reach a certain milestone

Optimizer

its not updating till someone has some stats

grc

e.g. graduate

Doorknob

ah

Optimizer

12:14

not graduate,

win the internet

grc

yeah and "If there's still a tie, which will be rare, the number of times that a site reached earlier game phases will also be taken into account"

Optimizer

oh

so you actually read the FAQ :D

grc

what else is there to do between clicks?

Doorknob

aha

Optimizer

wait ?

Doorknob

12:16

High traffic decreases quality

Optimizer

guys, for getting quality, close the questions

dont downvote

grc

why?

Optimizer

closing is faster

see the description

Zgarb

But that decreases questions, which decreases answers.

Optimizer

downvoting decreases users which decreases traffic

grc

12:17

it "severely decreases" questions :/

Zgarb

Traffic is given by answers + quality.

Or more probably min(answers, quality) or something like that.

Optimizer

its all inter related

somehow

"magic"

we are not getting anywhere by shuffling between quality and non-quality :/

Zgarb

Hmm, it seems that high answers and quality also increases users.

grc

actually we're progressing a lot faster than most sites

Doorknob

Anyone up for reverse engineering cdn.sstatic.net/js/stackegg.js? :P

Optimizer

12:20

because of you ? :P

Doorknob

I was hoping it'd be unminified on meta.dev.SE, but unfortunately it's not

grc

do you think the mechanics are in there or on the server?

aw no

gamedev won the internet

Doorknob

nooooooo

grc

trust them to

Optimizer

too many numbers

whoah, 272 days only

so we progress towards the win faster if stats are better ?

Zgarb

12:23

They probably learned to game the system early on.

Doorknob

they must know something that we don't >:O

Zgarb

Oh, they used a flag.

0.0 flags left.

Doorknob

Let's show them! We'll win the internet with a flag left! :P

Optimizer

10 more rounds

and now lets keep track of all top 5 sites and keep resetting them :D

VisualMelon

that just isn't sportsmanlike, optimizer

Doorknob

12:28

PPCG challenge: find the site closest to winning the internet

Optimizer

are there API to get anything ?

Doorknob

8 mins ago, by Doorknob

Anyone up for reverse engineering http://cdn.sstatic.net/js/stackegg.js? :P

grc

I'll have a crack at reverse engineering after we win

aw movies beat us too

Optimizer

:(

grc

with 1 flag left

Optimizer

12:30

for me , we still dont show up

Zgarb

No they didn't.

grc

yay

Optimizer

what happened ?

ah

Doorknob

we just barely beat Movies

grc

should we use a flag straight away this time?

Optimizer

12:31

no

in a couple of days

VisualMelon

woo 2nd

Optimizer

flags will start mattering

lets focus on questions this time

Zgarb

A flag is worth 10 days.

That may or may not be a lot.

Doorknob

Coffee won the internet too; now we're in 3rd

Optimizer

at least we know which sites to restart next

home improvement has 2 flags left

yeah, we used one in the beginning...

Sp3000

12:36

What's this about flags?

Doorknob

Yay public beta!

Optimizer

why do we still have 1 flag ?

how did home improvement get 2 flags ?

Sp3000

Oh did you guys use it really early last time?

Doorknob

You get one after entering public beta, and one after graduation

Optimizer

oh ok

yeah , we used one last time , very early

(had to)

Runer112

12:37

stack egg, what

Optimizer

or it woul dhave been shut down

Doorknob

13

Q: StackEgg - what is this thing called "fun"?

Is there an aim to this game? To play, click the side bar image --> Is this to educate people or just be "fun"1? Also, is it multi player? 1 Great use of dev time! :P

Optimizer

remember guys, questions before up votes

Runer112

you know, I might've screwed around with that a bit

if it didn't ask the same exact question over and over

which is kind of boring

grc

only 2 voters on gamedev atm if anyone wants to raid with me

Geobits

12:46

This game is... weird.

grc

@Doorknob phase_completion in the API?

Sp3000

Hmm this feels like and endless loop of slow...

PhiNotPi

We're really floundering around in public beta.

grc

we should write a bot for this

Sp3000

Even though private beta went so well

grc

12:52

just reset game dev

Zgarb

The best strategy, I think, is to max out questions (or keep it at 3 for starters), then increase answers and quality. Users will follow pretty much by themselves.

Sp3000

Low questions, max answers. Sounds like PPCG alright.

4

Optimizer

we need to remember that this is just a game

Geobits

We do koth with arbitrary rules all the time. If we can't game this thing to find a (near) optimum strategy, we should be ashamed ;)

4

VisualMelon

someone needs to start recording our moves, then we can do some Bayesian on it

Geobits

12:56

You could write a script to get all of this data as it changes.

PhiNotPi

I recorded our previous 35 moves.

By hand.

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