The Nineteenth Byte

El'endia Starman

4:04 PM

Ah, that's because it's a Ruby symbol, right?

TuxCopter

Yes

TheBitByte

@Poke I'm just saying they've almost become the same thing over and over again, just requiring you to print different outputs.

El'endia Starman

@TheBitByte Do you think the same is true for sequence challenges too?

flawr

@El'endiaStarman usually we use SNR instead of NSR :)

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

@KritixiLithos your joke has not passed unnoticed. lol

El'endia Starman

4:11 PM

@flawr I did think about writing "signal to noise" but it felt odd.

TheBitByte

@El'endiaStarman Mathematically speaking, all finite sequences have infinitely many valid nth terms, if I remember correctly.

El'endia Starman

@TheBitByte Uh, how is that relevant?

Fatalize

@TheBitByte You try way too hard to sound clever in here.

6

TheBitByte

@El'endiaStarman You should read behind the lines, I'm just saying sequence challenges can sometimes be boring if they're not done correctly, and it's kind of the same with kolmogorov-complexity challenges, which I've personally gotten tired of.

El'endia Starman

@TheBitByte In here and pretty much on Stack Exchange in general, if you need people to "read between the lines" to get your meaning, you've failed at communicating clearly.

@TheBitByte What distinguishes sequence and kolmogorov-complexity challenges? They're both instances of "output this pattern". What makes the former more interesting than the latter?

TheBitByte

4:21 PM

@El'endiaStarman You're deflecting now, you've not answered anything I said.

El'endia Starman

@TheBitByte You haven't really answered my questions either.

TheBitByte

@El'endiaStarman Both can become dull challenges when they're done incorrectly.

El'endia Starman

@TheBitByte That's true for every kind of challenge though.

What's the issue with kolmogorov-complexity challenges specifically?

TheBitByte

@El'endiaStarman I was just saying it's more true for these specific types of challenges. This is just my personal opinion, anyways, and I'm not forcing anybody else to accept it.

El'endia Starman

(For what it's worth, I don't find them as interesting either; I was just curious as to what your reasoning was.)

TheBitByte

4:25 PM

@El'endiaStarman There exists strings of arbitrarily large Kolmogorov complexity.

El'endia Starman

@TheBitByte A similar statement holds true for sequences.

Do you find sequences more interesting than strings?

TheBitByte

@El'endiaStarman Which I why I'd like to see more creative kolmorogov-complexity challenges, not just the usual ones already there.

El'endia Starman

@TheBitByte Personal opinions can be valuable, especially if they're backed up with solid reasoning that may potentially lead to an improvement in the quality of the site.

@TheBitByte What, in your opinion, distinguishes the creative KC challenges from the dull ones?

TheBitByte

@El'endiaStarman Well, in my opinion, this is a great one, this a funny, but dull one....

.... And this is a classical programming thing that is basically standard by now and very famous, thus I like the challenge, but at its core, it's again quite dull.

El'endia Starman

@TheBitByte Graphical KC challenges are pretty rare, so that alone makes the challenge of outputting the G in Google's logo much more interesting. Are there any text-only KC challenges you particularly like? Also, the rickroll lyrics challenge was one of the early ones, and has been a dupe target for many other challenges with the same idea. A recent example would support your point better.

@TheBitByte That challenge has a different purpose than most. Most challenges invite competition, but catalog challenges are meant simply to collect examples in many different languages. True, the core is not all that interesting, but it's not really meant to be.

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