The Nineteenth Byte

FlagAsSpam

10:00 PM

@quartata They're familiar with Vitsy, but not for CG.

El'endia Starman

@Rainbolt That is, I think, one of the coolest challenges ever.

Rainbolt

My art of code golf is like popcorn. When I make popcorn, I know it's done as soon as two pops are a full three seconds apart. Likewise, when I stare at my code for three minutes and cannot make an improvement, I know I am done golfing. At that point, I begin eating everyone else's popcorn. I try to see how many ideas I can steal without being totally obvious.

5

SuperJedi224

Goodbye for now.

quartata

@Rainbolt Stop stealing my strategy

Dennis

@quartata That looks interesting. Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it would on work only for English though...

Rainbolt

10:04 PM

You're safe - I haven't golfed in like a year

quartata

@Dennis It works decently on all ASCII

You can try out the little online demo thing

El'endia Starman

@FlagAsSpam You're solving two problems at once: the problem in the challenge, and the problem of doing it as short as possible. The second problem is often highly non-trivial because of the complexity and many options available in most languages.

FlagAsSpam

Perfect, thanks.

New Main Posts

3

Q: The alphanumeric spiral

The task is very simple, when given an input, output one of the following spirals: Input = 1 gives a spiral with the letter A beginning in the top left corner: A B C D E F T U V W X G S 5 6 7 Y H R 4 9 8 Z I Q 3 2 1 0 J P O N M L K Input = 2 gives a spiral with the letter A beginning in the t...

Dennis

@quartata Meh, !@#$%^&*()_+ gets a 0% compression ratio...

quartata

10:08 PM

@Dennis Huh..

Yeah, punctuation doesn't seem to be compressed...

It doesn't ever increase the size at least

Lemme try something

Dennis

Yes, Shoco has a huge dictionary of common patterns in English text.

Bubblegum defaults to base conversion, which also never increases the size.

quartata

Yeah :/

From what I read about it, you can create your own pattern tree if you want to handle something other than English

That's too much effort though

FlagAsSpam

Just make a n-gram sequence.

quartata

Shoco is only really useful for compressing things like output

FlagAsSpam

Probably trigrams.

quartata

10:11 PM

When challenges want something like "This isn't a prime" or whatever.

The real question is which one is better in these situations: bijective base 96 or shoco

Doorknob

Bijective base-96 is just string.frombase(96), right? I can write a script to find out :P

Dennis

@quartata Effort isn't the issue. The question is what should we train it with?

quartata

@Dennis I can think of two obvious pattern trees: Jelly code (for evaluating itself) and English

Dennis

@Doorknob Sort of. I use this in Bubblegum:

def bb96decode(bbytes, a = 0, s = []):
    bbytes = list(bbytes)
    for byte in bbytes:
      if byte == 10:
        byte = 127
      a = 96 * a + byte - 31
    while a:
      r = a % 256
      s = [r] + s
      a //= 256
    return bytes(s)

For Jelly, I'd change 256 to 255 to avoid escaping the string delimiter.

quartata

Also, something interesting I thought of was characters similar to ' for strings of length 2, 3 or 4

So like 'test

Rainbolt

10:17 PM

'

Thomas Kwa

@quartata That would probably take up too much space in the one-byte range.

quartata

@ThomasKwa Yeah.

Thomas Kwa

Maybe length 2, but 3 and 4 sound too rare, especially since they save a maximum of one byte when they are used.

quartata

We might have room for a common length, like 2

ninja'd

Thomas Kwa

@Rainbolt Three minutes? You don't golf hard enough.

Dennis

10:21 PM

Certainly an interesting idea.

I am also considering adding equivalents to the two-link joints for more than two links.

quartata

Also will we go where no APL derivative has gone and make triadic atoms

(joke)

El'endia Starman

@quartata Mmmm....3D APL...

quartata

@El'endiaStarman Not Minkolang-3D either.

Truly breaking new ground.

El'endia Starman

I think you're actually right about that.

quartata

The first non-Befunge variant 3D language.

Sadly, it would have no use in golfing whatsoever.

El'endia Starman

10:26 PM

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a 3D non-funge, but this would very likely be the first 3D APL-like language.

Dennis

I don't know how to combine triadic atoms with the chains, but triadic modifiers are planed.

20

Q: Parse a two-dimensional syntax

Background Alice and Bob are creating a golfing language to win every single PPCG challenge. Alice wants to make a two-dimensional language, like ><>, but Bob prefers a prefix-infix syntax like in J. As a compromise, they decide to create a two-dimensional prefix-infix language. The parser is a ...

code-golf grid parsing

We should combine that syntax with Jelly and call the language Jelly><>.

2

Zgarb

@Dennis I approve of this suggestion.

quartata

@Dennis yas

El'endia Starman

Agreed!

quartata

A 2D APL would be really interesting.

Trains going in all directions

Thomas Kwa

10:28 PM

It would need some new features that make it sometimes better than Jelly/APL, because any good golfing language should win at least one challenge.

@quartata I'll need to think about this

Dennis

@ThomasKwa Interpret Jelly><>? :P

FlagAsSpam

Yes please.

Dennis

Hm, Hello World and 99 bottles are spoken for, but I think there's no 0-byte FizzBuzz answer yet...

quartata

@Dennis There is a one byte.

El'endia Starman

Coconut fight.

quartata

10:31 PM

Speaking of which, I can't wait to get string manipulation so we can do FizzBuzz in Jelly

I wonder if it'll beat Rotor.

Dennis

@quartata Can't compete with the 0-byte Jelly><> answer.

quartata

(who am I kidding of course it will)

Dennis

We'll see. J/APL are really bad at string manipulation. That's probably lack of built-ins though...

Alex A.

@ThomasKwa Golf Hard: The Thomas Kwa Story

Golf Hard 2: Golf Harder

Golf Hard 3: Golf Hard with a Vengeance

Golf Hard 4: Live Free or Golf Hard

SuperJedi224

10:46 PM

Hi.

Dennis

@quartata I think it would be quite easy to beat shoco for English. Take a dictionary such as /usr/share/dict/words and make non-printable ASCII characters correspond to those words. 3 bytes would be enough to refer to all those, with common variations (e.g., title case or upper case).

Thomas Kwa

@AlexA. Sometimes I work on golfing one program for a few hours straight, then over the course of the next few days, I realize a few ways to shave off bytes.

Dennis

I know the feeling.

Thomas Kwa

That's how I got 82-byte Conway's Game of Life in TI-BASIC

It took me at least a week to find the correct approach.

Which reminds me: since the game-of-life question was closed, we don't have one.

Dennis

Counting only code golf, I think this is the answer I've invested the most time in:

15

A: Hunt the Wumpus

GolfScript, 163 :n;:`"You shot the wumpus. ""The wumpus ate you. ""The pit swallowed you. "{19:|rand}2*0|{[:,~,4%"ftvh"=.,+,@-]{20%}%}:^{;.^.+.3$?>"You feel a breeze. "1$6"You smell a wumpus. "4$8{$?-1>*p}2*'"#{'|):|';`head -1`}"'++~{3%}/={=3$=|{"Your shot missed. "p@^3rand=@@}if}{=@;}if.[|4$6$]...

I was just getting started with GolfScript IIRC.

Thomas Kwa

11:02 PM

Should a Game of Life catalog be graphical-output, or ASCII, or allow either?

Wait, I forgot we don't like catalogs anymore

mınxomaτ

VS13 has to install an update to uninstall itself. Classic Microsoft.

PhiNotPi

I'm going to die in my biomedical engineering final tomorrow.

Thomas Kwa

@PhiNotPi Ah, so your final is to turn yourself into a cyborg, giving up your fleshy body in the process?

Good luck!

PhiNotPi

It's the Xtreme weed-out class for biomedical engineers, class average is like low 60s, I'm trying to keep a B.

El'endia Starman

Great coordination. (Five male gymnasts on four bars.)

Thomas Kwa

11:05 PM

@PhiNotPi low 60s seems like a reasonable average to me, actually

Should we close codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/9309/…

Or maybe remove the c tag?

People are answering it and it's annoying.

PhiNotPi

Not when the class is mostly "honors students," ... or at least I've never really experienced a class before with that low of an average.

Thomas Kwa

I don't see it as a problem; as long as the proportion of marks given is reasonable.

Dennis

What is Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch's and why is it in my dictionary?

PhiNotPi

The name of a town in the UK

Thomas Kwa

@Dennis A name for some Welsh town, which is intentionally long for publicity.

Dennis

11:11 PM

It's working.

Alex A.

@PhiNotPi I often forget that Wales is part of the UK.

PhiNotPi

It's the best part of the UK

don't tell England or Scotland that I said that

Dennis

And I though pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis was long...

Alex A.

I won't

PhiNotPi

especially not Northern Ireland

Dennis

11:12 PM

OK, all long words of my dictionary as essentially useless.

aditsu

@Dennis funny, I watched this 1 or 2 days ago:

Liam Dutton nails pronouncing Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

►

FlagAsSpam

@Dennis St Mary's church in the hollow of the white hazel near to the fierce whirlpool and the church of St Tysilio of the red cave.

That's what it means. :P

Thomas Kwa

@FlagAsSpam Means to whom, I'm not sure.

PhiNotPi

There's also antidisestablishmentarianism, although I don't personally support it.

FlagAsSpam

@ThomasKwa To the Welsh.

RikerW

11:15 PM

@PhiNotPi That is floccinaucinihilipilification.

Thomas Kwa

@FlagAsSpam I was expressing doubt that people think about a hollow of the white hazel near to a fierce whirlpool and a church of St Tysilio of the red cave when the say the name.

Dennis

@aditsu o_O

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