The Nineteenth Byte

First of all, a little bit of the profile I represent : I'm not able to do anything else than reasoning logicly, and I love threating my mind with puzzle.

BrainSteel

That's a line of thinking that probably resonates with most of us :)

Katenkyo

First thought when saw this site was "wow, those guys are impressive, I will never get to there level nor being able to understand what they do"

trichoplax

For all of you: What first brought you to the site?

Katenkyo

12:08 AM

Some of the code explanations below the code-golf answered helped me getting a little bit rid of this feeling, but it's still here : you guys are amazing and it's hard to think we could compete against

Doorknob

@trichoplax I... uhhh, actully don't know. Hmm.

Katenkyo

@trichoplax I was looking for thing on SO, I saw a [??] question on the hot, was intrigued, then saw PPCG, and was amazed

BrainSteel

@trichoplax I honestly don't know how I ended up here. Probably SO. Or I may have googled some programming problem that happened to be a challenge here.

Doorknob

Yes, I think many of our users came from HNQ

trichoplax

I came for a KotH and stayed for massively overvoted graphical output popularity contest answers

Katenkyo

12:09 AM

If I should name the thing that forced me to register, it was KotH

trichoplax

(and I also first saw it from HNQ on SO)

Katenkyo

It's a funny concept, everyone can compete without needing High skills

It's maybe one of the most powerful tool to attract people

trichoplax

Yes I do like questions where a valid answer is easy but a good answer is hard

Katenkyo

Because it is the only content on this SE that can be joined easily, everything else is really hard to get into

Doorknob

Huh, I posted my first thing (a challenge) here on January of 2013, but I have no idea how I found the site :P

BrainSteel

12:11 AM

Of course, it comes at the cost of being hard to produce those challenges.

trichoplax

Well I have a few KotHs in the sandbox so maybe I should prioritise them (and space them out so we get long coverage)

Katenkyo

@BrainSteel I agree, it's very time consuming

trichoplax

Yes indeed

Katenkyo

@trichoplax Spacing them is a good idea, do it at your own rythm

BrainSteel

I think, for most purposes, it's good to have about 1 or 2 KoTH running at one time on the site (and that's thereabouts of what we have).

trichoplax

12:12 AM

Is there any challenge type that people want to answer but we don't have many questions?

Katenkyo

But I have to say, now I start to get into, I start to understand some of the tricks used in other contest

And it's getting really interesting for me

BrainSteel

I think the highest-quality answers are from popcon graphical-output challenges, but it's so incredibly tricky to make a good challenge in that genre.

trichoplax

I haven't got into the golf side of things, but I did do some golfing for a byte limited popularity contest, which was almost a hybrid question

Katenkyo

I don't know much about concise language, the only language I handle are C and Java so I don't post my answers (I can't golf them enought, I'm not that good), but with a little bit of free time it now appears in my reach :)

BrainSteel

(e.g. Martin's Voronoi Map Challenge produced just about the best answers I've seen on this site)

Katenkyo

12:14 AM

@BrainSteel It's the challenge that attracted me :D

voronoi sounded like "wait, I know that, but can't remember"

BrainSteel

That challenge is so good. I also think audio-output challenges have potential, but we don't get very many of them (even with the soundcloud in-answers)

trichoplax

@Katenkyo Have you tried Tweetable Mathematical Art? It's C++ so your C would give you a headstart and it's an upper limit on bytes rather than trying to get lower than everyone else. It might be a good stepping stone towards pure golf questions

Katenkyo

@trichoplax I might give it a try when I'm done with my internship report (must be ended in 6h if I want to print it in colors)

trichoplax

(viewing it oldest first is a nice way to see the progression from simple ideas upwards)

Oh - don't look at it if you have work to do - it's addictive...

Katenkyo

@trichoplax I know, that's why I closed it right away x)

I've just read the specs

trichoplax

12:18 AM

lol

Katenkyo

I've wasted some precious hours of work reading the evolution of hello world, can't waste any more x)

BrainSteel

I found myself with a random night of not much work to do :D

Katenkyo

By the way, I'd like to make a chain-answered question, i'm trying to find a good one :)

Oh, and by the way, feeling of a newcomer again : don't care too much about the number of question. Your community is great, don't force them in a way they don't want :)

Dennis

@jimmy23013 Congratulations on hitting 10k!

10

Doorknob

@Dennis hey that's my job :P

Dennis

12:22 AM

FGITW

BrainSteel

I took several pictures of stop signs at 1520x2688 resolution. Unfortunately, this is 4.5 GB. How many times do you think one could scale such a thing down and still have recognizable stop signs?

Katenkyo

70*130 would still be recognizable I think

trichoplax

@BrainSteel Do you want them to be in colour? You could keep a higher resolution if you made them two tone black and white images

Katenkyo

hum... fuck... Can't remember what's "obfuscated" in french...

BrainSteel

I do need them to be in color, unfortunately.

I'll try 70*130

Katenkyo

12:34 AM

@BrainSteel It should be barely recognizable, at least by the shape x)

BrainSteel

Well, okay, what size would be differentiable from a DO NOT ENTER sign? :P

Katenkyo

hum... 350*650?

cutting size by only 16 times, but should be nice

trichoplax

@BrainSteel You should definitely be able to go smaller for No Entry signs, unless you want to be able to distinguish them from Stop signs...

BrainSteel

That's exactly what I want to do.

Katenkyo

Oh man, so boring to write down the specs of Ant Task >_<*

trichoplax

12:45 AM

@Katenkyo You also have an ant question?

New Sandboxed Posts

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

[Insert] Nerd Sniping Pattern (Series) Having learned from Prime Nerd Sniping Pattern that hoping an optimal solution will not be spotted too quickly is not a good idea, I'd like to judge how much interest there is in a series of similar contests that have been demonstrated to not have an achiev...

Katenkyo

@trichoplax No, I had to write some ant task for my internship, so I have to define them in my paper...

(I was designing and implementing a continuous integration plateform, and ant is a useful tool)

trichoplax

Ah I see

Katenkyo

The problem is I did only technical stuff/looking for docs, and the teach' who will look at my report is a mathematician...

So I have to explain everything... even the most obvious IT things

trichoplax

So you know it works but now you have to prove it?

Katenkyo

12:52 AM

@trichoplax It's more than that, I have to prove it and explain it with non-technical words...

trichoplax

Explaining makes sure you really understand it, but that's tough in just a few hours...

Katenkyo

In fact, I have to explain how it use an SOAP to makes the WebSphere server acknowledge the deployement of the EAR, then, when deploy is over (and ended without errors), it launch sequentially all the scripts in a folder (those are fonctionnal tests), while retrieving results and restoring the initial state of the machine for the next script

By the way, Hudson, ClearCase, WebSphere, a custom webservice, ant, and a VM windows are used during this process

struggling to explain everything

trichoplax

1:11 AM

Can you contact your teacher to ask whether any of those can be omitted? Or is it already confirmed that you must cover all of them?

Sparr

"how it use an SOAP" <-- this makes my head hurt

Katenkyo

@trichoplax My report must reflect all the work I've done so far during the past 2 months. As I don't have much code in terms quantity, it is important to show the what's behind it. So no, it can't be omitted :/

@Sparr Sorry for that ^^'

PhiNotPi

The S is silent.

Katenkyo

I know, I should even have get rid of the "a" by saying "how it uses SOAP"

Vioz-

2:13 AM

I have a delicious question coming up :)

Katenkyo

@Vioz- About what? :)

Vioz-

I posted in the sandbox, the bot should pick it up any minute now

trichoplax

@Vioz- I'd drop the "Mc" to avoid advertising...

New Sandboxed Posts

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Nuggets of Code It's Friday evening, and you've invited over the usual golfing buddies to participate in your favourite hobby: code golfing. However, as this is such a brain-draining task, you need to pick up some brain food for the group so you can golf as much as possible off your code. Now, ...

Vioz-

What if I change it to MickDonald's? :P

trichoplax

2:22 AM

Still sounds like advertising to me :P

Where I am, there are many types of chicken nuggets, not just from one company

Katenkyo

I'm Hungry...

Vioz-

I have fixed it ;)

Katenkyo

fuck me... OpenOffice just cracked some of my images, and I don't have them on my computer...

I'm getting desesperate...

trichoplax

@Vioz- I wonder if you need to define prices. At present is it possible to tell whether 2 large packs and 1 small one works out cheaper than 1 large pack and 3 small ones?

Sp3000

@NewSandboxedPosts Something makes me think surely that's already been done, but I'm having trouble looking up the coin problem here...

Closest thing I've found so far is this

trichoplax

2:27 AM

Does it also overlap with knapsack problems?

Vioz-

I tried to explain this in the post, but you want to minimize the price you're paying per nugget, so you can assume the larger the pack, the cheaper per nugget it is always. So the less packs you buy to fit the number should always be the cheaper option.

trichoplax

3

Q: Solve the knapsack problem

Knapsack Problem (Actually, this is a subset of real knapsack problem.... - there's nothing to optimize!) The knapsack problem is: Given positive integers , and an integer S, find non-negative integers satisfies ... or in (my bad) English... Suppose you have many stuffs which weight...

code-golf

@Vioz- So 10, 4, 4 will be more expensive than 9, 9?

Vioz-

Yes.

I'll put prices in that make it clear this will be the case.

trichoplax

Cool

Vioz-

I added a price table to hopefully demonstrate what I'm describing

I think my problem is sufficiently different from the knapsack problem, since I'm not looking for all combinations, just the cheapest.

trichoplax

2:41 AM

Could it be answered with an answer to the knapsack question, followed by "return the shortest"?

Sp3000

btw even though builtins are a standard loophole, I think it might be good if you explicitly banned some builtins for this one (side note)

Vioz-

I believe that the shortest solution is always the correct one

I can't prove it, but I haven't figured out a case where a shorter answer isn't correct

And yeah @Sp3000, I'm thinking of what builtins to exclude

Sp3000

Definitely FroebniusSolve, and maybe some knapsack stuff

Katenkyo

@Vioz- just exclude them, Mathematica may have one to solve your problem

It's as I said x)

Sp3000

Man, do we have to code in the price table now?

Vioz-

2:48 AM

I put the price table in for clarity, whichever solution takes the least number of boxes seems to always be right

until this can be proven otherwise. If there's a tie I would allow just printing one

Or possibly then prices would need to come into play..

Sp3000

22 has two solutions requiring 3 packs

Katenkyo

@Sp3000 So the solution using bigger pack wins :)

9,9,4 and 10,8,4 right?

so 10,8,4 would win

Vioz-

9,9,4 and 10,6,6 actually, no 8s

And by price, 9,9,4 wins..

might need to workshop that

Katenkyo

oh, forgot there's no 8 x)

Sp3000

Yeah, 9,9,4 wins on price

Vioz-

2:53 AM

Let's see, I mean it would make sense for 9,9,4 to win

Katenkyo

if you want a real average "weight" per pack, you could look at a thing like

(9²+9²+4²)/3

to determine weither it's better (highest value win)

it would be 196/3 against 172/3

Vioz-

Hey, that actually works! I think I can get rid of pricing then

Katenkyo

Squaring helps determine a real "average" value per box for the same total value :)

Vioz-

I think I'll do that then :)

Katenkyo

I think you could get rid of the division, as it has no useful meaning

Vioz-

2:56 AM

I believe that only need apply when there's a tie though

Katenkyo

I'm looking for an other example :3

Vioz-

Me too

Katenkyo

2h untill I run out of time...

It will be hard to work today...

Vioz-

Haha :P

Katenkyo

Hum, last beer is empty...

I'm thursty

New Sandboxed Posts

3:32 AM

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Code golf decathlon Right now, this is just an idea for a new challenge type rather than a specific challenge. Keeping track of the scores will be a headache, but I think it will be fun. Tasks All competitors try to solve this list of 10 tasks: [insert list of fairly trivial tasks here] Rul...

Katenkyo

Oh, dennis is still awaken !

Dennis

It's 23:30 here, so not surprisingly.

Sp3000

@NewSandboxedPosts "new challenge type" - sounds like some of the 9 holes

Dennis

@Sp3000 OK, "old challenge type". :P

Sp3000

Hmm they seem to take the sum of lengths though

Dennis

3:37 AM

Scoring is slightly different though.

Katenkyo

@Dennis Where are you leaving? USA?

Dennis

@Katenkyo South America.

Doorknob

The 9-hole challenges were never an "official" challenge type/genre anyway.

Sp3000

The decathlon sounds great, but my only concern is 10 different users each choosing to Pyth a different task

Katenkyo

@Dennis I see why it is so soon there, it's 05:40 in France ^^

Dennis

3:43 AM

@Sp3000 So each of them gets at most two bonus points using Pyth. There are still 9 other answers, where every user can score up to 18 points.

And I hope to cramp at least one or two tasks in there where Pyth would be suboptimal. :P

Doorknob

@Dennis Good luck with that... ;)

Dennis

@Doorknob Sp3000 and I are still leading in Stretching Words, so it's not impossible.

There are also tasks where APL/J/K/Q are really good.

Sp3000

Oh it's task-language combo, not task, right...

Dennis

Yes, I've edited to clarify.

One bonus point for the shortest for each task, one bonus point for the shortest for each task-language combination.

Sp3000

That makes sense

Doorknob

3:48 AM

You might be able to make the leaderboard a Stack Snippet, assuming everyone formats language names and such the same way.

Sp3000

Expect a submission in all obscure languages just for the fun of it :D

Dennis

@Doorknob That's a pretty big assumption. :P

Doorknob

I guess you could standardize them a bit, and turn, say, "python 2," "PYTHON--2," and "Python-2" all into "PYTHON2"

Sp3000

D: caaaaaaaaps

Doorknob

or lowercase them all :P

Dennis

3:51 AM

@Doorknob That's actually one of the details I'd have to add. It should be Python, period.

Sp3000

Just tell them to specify which version in the notes

Dennis

Great! Now all I have to do is learn JavaScript and how to write Stack Snippets. :P

OK, if I get everybody to use exactly ### Task [number], [language], [length], that should be doable. I guess editing non-conforming answers will be easier than updating the scores manually.

Doorknob

You could make the number of #s variable as well

Dennis

Ugh, updates. Posting time is tie breaker, so the snippet would have to go through the revisions to figure out when a particular answer achieved a particular score for a particular task-language combination.

Doorknob

You could use the API.

Dennis

4:05 AM

I've never used the (or any) API, but I guess I can copy a great deal of code from other stack snippets. However, none of them take posting time into account. I'm not really sure how to implement that.

New Sandboxed Posts

4:28 AM

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Build a Mahjong AI Mahjong is a traditional Chinese gambling game played throughout Asia in which four players draw and discard tiles in order to try to complete a hand of 14 tiles. In this problem, a specification for a simplified version of Mahjong called "PPCG Mahjong" was given. Your task i...

Dennis

I could simply the snippet a lot if I forbid changing languages for a task, but I think that would hurt the challenge.

Dennis

4:40 AM

*simplify

New Main Posts

8:19 AM

0

Q: Xcode6 building for always

OS X Yosemite:10.10.4 , Xcode:6.3.2 and Object-C+Swift. today, my project building for always,but I can't find the reason, what caused this situation?

hello-world

Optimizer

8:56 AM

What to do with this ^ question

it added a tag of hello-world, but honestly, no tag suits it

should we create a tag off-topic for such questions ?

(otherwise they appear in tag search results)

Katenkyo

@Optimizer Wouldn't a tag mean that we accept what it contains as part of our site?

Optimizer

@Katenkyo but their is no way to not have a tag

Cool Guy

Hi

Katenkyo

@CoolGuy Hi

@Optimizer Totally de-tag them?

Optimizer

its not possible

I think my first line was clear enough

(except for the typo)

Katenkyo

9:02 AM

@Optimizer So let's go for a off-topic tag, at least untill we find something better

Optimizer

done

ProgramFOX

@Optimizer No; that would be a useless tag.

Optimizer

@ProgramFOX better useless than misleading & incorrect

ProgramFOX

well, as soon as the question is deleted the tag will get deleted too, so it doesn't matter much actually

Optimizer

off topic questions are never deleted

they are just put [on hold]

ProgramFOX

9:05 AM

They are; if not manually, automatically.

after a while

Optimizer

No, they just become [closed]

1

Q: Write an Antiquine

Definitions: I define a "true antiquine" as follows: A true antiquine is a non-empty computer program of length n which takes no input and produces a copy of every valid program of length n in the same language, except the original program. I define a "modified antiquine" as follows: A...

code-golf code-challenge

0

Q: Create a Scalable Valentine's Day Heart

Happy Valentine's Day! To celebrate this day of love and happiness (or sadness and loneliness for those of us who are single...), let's write some code to create some hearts! Specifically, if you take this challenge upon you, you are to write code to output a heart/hearts as an image file, with ...

popularity-contest image-processing

ProgramFOX

@Optimizer Those have answers

no auto-deletion in that case

See meta: meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006/229438

Optimizer

I see

Cool Guy

9:25 AM

Quick poll: What would you call a robot that shoots non-stop?

Katenkyo

@CoolGuy Machine-gun?

Cool Guy

@Katenkyo , Does "machine-gun" fit for this guy?

Zgarb

@CoolGuy More Dakka

Cool Guy

That's more like it! Thanks!

New Main Posts

10:45 AM

-5

Q: ensures that your hair growth cycle

Let me show you. This ensures that your hair growth cycle does not get sluggish with age, but stays in top condition. You can take the pills with your meals. That's the time to dominate the Silk of Morocco market wherever that doesn't always work. Piece of advice straight from the expert's desk ...

c

Doorknob

wow, spam on PPCG

@Optimizer Why did you create an off-topic tag?

Cool Guy

@Doorknob chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/22353172#22353172

Doorknob

ah

@Optimizer No.

Doorknob

11:05 AM

From @DigitalTrauma's (or whatever he calls himself in chat now) profile. I have the power! :P

New Main Posts

0

Q: Confusing puzzle

I have come across a puzzle, which makes no sense. Does anyone know the answer to the below? (apologies if this is not the right use of this forum!): "You and two friends go on holiday. When checking out, the total bill comes to £300. You pay the billand begin to walk out. The clerk realises th...

puzzle-solver word-puzzle

Optimizer

@Doorknob Its still better than hello-world tag. But then if it will eventually get deleted, it does not really matter

Katenkyo

HUm, they can't do the difference between PPCG and Puzzling :/

Doorknob

No, it's not better, because the tag has absolutely zero value to our site.

Optimizer

2 hours ago, by Optimizer

@ProgramFOX better useless than misleading & incorrect

Doorknob

11:21 AM

No, not really.

It'll get Roomba'd soon anyway.

Katenkyo

HUm, just spent 30 mins correcting a bug that was already corrected 2 hours ago...

@Doorknob I agree with optimizer on this poin, as long as it's stay a transitory solution to a better one

feersum

11:40 AM

Does anyone think this challenge is interesting? meta.codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/2140/…

I like it because it's generally easy for a human to figure out, but hard to write a program for.

I couldn't decide on the victory condition last time I was working on it

I'm wondering if I should go back to a secret list of test positions, but not sure if people would like that

Sp3000

11:56 AM

I'm not so sure about "it's generally easy for a human to figure out", especially if there's a pawn which you can't tell whether or not it's possible to be promoted

(Unless you ruled out promotions somewhere?)

feersum

Promotions exist

It's easy to me, at least

Nathan Merrill

12:38 PM

Out of curiousity, are you guys active in other online communities?

I used to be, until the community died out

and I was feeling nostalgic, so I was curious about the rest of you

BrainSteel

@feersum this is definitely a tricky problem for a computer, but I can think of some approaches and it is certainly interesting. I like the idea.

feersum

@BrainSteel Do you like the scoring on secret test cases, or prefer another method?

Katenkyo

@NathanMerrill I was active on a Monster Hunter Freedom Unite forum for some years, before the forum collapsed due to a lack of moderator and too much newcomers ^^

Nathan Merrill

is that a game?

Katenkyo

Makes me think I spent sooooo many time in this game.... About like, what, 1200h?

Nathan Merrill

12:43 PM

such a bizarre name :P

Katenkyo

@NathanMerrill Yes

Monster Hunter is the name of the game, freedom is an appendice for the PsP version. And Unite is the european name, officialy it's 2'n'G (2nd opus with an extension)

Nathan Merrill

I used to hang out at nowhere-else.org

it's still alive, but just barely

Katenkyo

@NathanMerrill What's that about?

Nathan Merrill

it was an rpg

but the reason I liked it was because I could design my own quests/mazes/puzzles

BrainSteel

@feersum That's a tricky problem. Also, is there a way we should handle positions like KNN5/8/8/8/8/8/8/K7? This position is a draw, yielding the end of the game immediately in some contexts, but checkmate is still possible.

Katenkyo

12:47 PM

Hum, a private final int is modified by an other class without using any access....

BrainSteel

k7*

Katenkyo

It barely read the value...

@NathanMerrill Wow, it's nice !

feersum

@BrainSteel it only matters whether white can be checkmated

Doorknob

@NathanMerrill I'm often floating around in IRC - typically #nethack on Freenode and #rust on Mozilla's network.

feersum

By any sequence of moves with both players cooperating

Doorknob

12:48 PM

Also the nethack, xkcd, and a few other subreddits.

BrainSteel

@feersum So we would ignore that the game is technically over?

feersum

I don't understand

Doorknob

@BrainSteel In certain cases, it's possible to force checkmate with two knights. Your board is a guaranteed draw though, I think.

feersum

Checkmate is possible with 2 knights

Doorknob

In certain cases.

BrainSteel

12:51 PM

2N + K vs. K is a drawn position under certain conditions in some rule sets. e.g. There is no next move, thus checkmate is impossible.

Doorknob

Two knights endgame

The two knights endgame is a chess endgame with a king and two knights versus a king, possibly with some other material. The material with the defending king is usually one pawn, but some positions studied involve additional pawns or other pieces. In contrast to a king plus two bishops (on opposite-colored squares), or a bishop and a knight, a king and two knights cannot force checkmate against a lone king. (However, the superior side can force stalemate.) Although there are checkmate positions, the superior side cannot force them against proper (and easy) defense (Speelman, Tisdall & Wade 1993...

feersum

There is a sequence of legal moves that ends in checkmate. That's all that matters.

Katenkyo

With 2NKvK can lead to a checkmate, but they can't force it

Meaning it's theorically possible if your opponent was aiming to losing

BrainSteel

Okay, I understand the question now. Silly me, overcomplicating things ;)

Katenkyo

(knights for the win <3)