The Nineteenth Byte

2:02 AM

Quick chat poll: are popularity-contest questions still accepted by this community? I want to do something like Paint Starry Night but for audio compression, and I think humans are a better measure of audio reproduction that any distance metric I could come up with

Meta is very unclear - I don't want to post a question if it will just get a torrent of downvotes solely because it features the popularity-contest tag

There seems to be no consensus, but I'm fine with them. Especially in situations where the scoring metric is specific but qualitative, like audio quality

Bubbler

2:18 AM

The last meta consensus about pop-cons was back in 2017

Although it is on the list of things to avoid when writing challenges, it looks like there are successful pop-cons from time to time

So the general suggestion is just to try it in the sandbox and check if the community likes it.

(We had one already this year btw)

Not that "we had one already this year" makes a really great argument for its usage :p

Bubbler

Well, yeah. Just that there was a recent success with it, so it isn't entirely dead.

Razetime

2:57 AM

maybe theres a good way to get people to grade stuff on specific criteria

Lyxal

TIL why creating a custom number class is a bad idea for an esolang

because you have to create so many dang functions to deal w/ it

like implement your own range function because python ranges use default int instead of custom class

4:04 AM

Why I never get anything done:
1. Realize I'm bored
2. Click my CGCC bookmark
3. Already read all the posts on the front page
4. Work on some project for a few minutes
5. Repeat

Sometimes I'll get in this loop and realize 15 minutes in that I've done nothing but stare at the same line of code a dozen times and think the exact same thing over and over again /:

Razetime

me_irl

Unrelated String

4:23 AM

yep

user202729

5:20 AM

@Sisyphus Not sure about that. If it gets sufficiently good they're just going to be "all good enough".

Also, depends on what kind of sound. Music would be probably fine, but if it's English then not everyone.

Unrelated String

5:50 AM

also, consider that people might want to upvote clever or otherwise pleasing solutions that don't actually perform super well

and there's only three "grades" each person can assign to each solution, between upvoting, downvoting, and doing nothing

and I'm not sure you'd want to encourage downvotes

6:12 AM

If it's a popularity-contest, I expect a brainfuck answer that outputs a few minutes of silence to win.

4

9:52 AM

How on earth did lynn, teebee and llhuii do Fizz Buzz in 48 bytes on anarchy golf, when the next best is 56? golf.shinh.org/p.rb?FizzBuzz#Python

In Python

10:06 AM

I'm not sure, but the next best answers are much older; perhaps they used a new feature?

There are a couple of insanely shorter answers in 2018 for other langs as well

So either crazy new fizz buzz algorithm

or exploiting something in the anarchy golf environment?

Eg for ruby:
Rank User Size Time Date Statistics
1 llhuii 31 0.4933 2018/11/10 10:44:52 0B / 9B / 22B
2 ksk 50 0.0162 2011/02/15 00:33:41 0B / 25B / 24B
Look at the bytes diff, but also execution time

many of these answers are also made by the same users.

10:34 AM

Ahhh found how it was done. It's cheating

How exactly (or how do you know?)?

Not sure i want to reveal and ruin the leaderboards

but it's not legit fizzbuzz

And it's likely none of the other absurdly low scores are legit either

...even by cheating i can only get 51 :<

Unrelated String

:<

10:50 AM

got it

now on the leaderboards as 'sisyphus (cheat)' (48)

11:01 AM

I am now really worried by the user "mitchs (cheat)" who is #1 in brainfuck and also used some binary and alphanumeric characters. (perhaps the interpreter had a 'feature' that allowed some users to use x86-64 assembly for golfing?)

wait what? haha

11:56 AM

@Sisyphus Pop-cons are still technically on-topic, but in order to give them an objective winning criteria, you basically need to specify what voters can and can't vote for (e.g. code length = yes, fav language = no)

1:30 PM

Any final feedback?

@cairdcoinheringaahing Your quoted markdown is mangled.

@Adám How so? It looks fine to me?

@cairdcoinheringaahing "the three character Python 2 program" should be `8` not just 8

@Adám So it is, thanks!

Similarly " 8`" has a space.

1:35 PM

Yeah, that's taken over from the original pristine programming challenge

Yup, looks ok now.

I think I might be able to get rid of it tho

@cairdcoinheringaahing And that's probably using old MD render.

Q: Output the International Phonetic Alphabet

Yeah it has `` `8`` so that the backtick isn't caught in the code block

New Main Posts

4:40 PM

0

The International Phonetic Alphabet is a system of phonetic notation intended to be able to accurately represent every sound used in spoken language. Unless I'm missing any, which I don't think I am, the alphabet contains 78 consonant letters mɱnɳɲŋɴpbtdʈɖcɟkɡqɢʡʔszʃʒʂʐɕʑɸβfvθðçʝxɣχʁħʕhʋɹɻjɰⱱɾɽʙr...

6:18 PM

Did this site just switch the code block color scheme? Javascript Math shows up orange now.

Same with class names in most langs I think

Wheat Wizard

Syntax highlighting changed

There is a post on meta.stackexchange about it

code-golf grid game-of-life

Yeah, I must have had the old CSS cached. Just noticed the change today.

TBH I'm not sure I like it. The strings are so subtly different from normal text I can barely tell where they end without looking for the quotes.

New Main Posts

7:34 PM

0

Q: Conway's Game of Points!

Rest in peace, John Horton Conway There are a ton of different Game of Life interpreters out there! A ton! Currently for you, getting an interpreter is just a dozen types and a couple of clicks away. But wait, do you notice a common thing in the interpreters? Every interpreter is graphical, i.e t...

Working on an automaton (language?) where every operator is a vertex on a grid of tessellated hexagons

That makes it so that each operator connects to every other operator by three connections. Any ideas for the terminology for the vertexes and connections?

Nodes and edges, like graph theory?

7:51 PM

Maybe, I was also thinking about calling the edges "pins", like with eletronics

8:05 PM

Is there any consensus on handling languages that don't use bytes with a base of 2?

@RedwolfPrograms Yeah, I think so, let me look.

Kinda a crazy idea for a cops/robbers that I'm not entirely sure would work: robbers have to outgolf the cops, but can use any language they like. There's the obvious problem that people would just default to 05AB1E/Jelly vs Python/Javascript, I was just wondering if it might be possible to make it fair in some way

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

To prevent super obscure langauges from winning, you could have a requirement for robbers that the language had to have been used by another user's cop submission

New Sandboxed Posts

0

Make a matrix singular Let $$M = \begin{bmatrix} m_{11} & \cdots & m_{1n} \\ \vdots & \ddots & \vdots \\ m_{n1} & \cdots & m_{nn} \end{bmatrix} $$ be a square matrix of size \$n\times n\$ with all elements \$m_{ij} \in \mathbb{Z}\$ (i.e. integers) We can define a function \$\text{sing}(M)\$ as $$...

A: How to count bytes in 7 (and other languages that use fractional numbers of bytes)

17

The answer's score is the source code's size Unless you can store your program somehow by using only 3 bits, you cannot claim a size of ⅜ bytes. That's the only rule that makes sense in the long run, since claiming scores that cannot actually be achieved by any implementation will inevitably lea...

8:13 PM

@RedwolfPrograms If you do that tho, if all the answers have been Python/Java/Javascript etc. and one person posts a Jelly answer, it blows the challenge wide open for robbers

Not sure if something like that could ever be prevented. It would probably just turn into a "which language has builtins/functions/methods/syntax that do this in the fewest bytes" sort of thing. I do like the idea though

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

(Bit of backstory/explanation): I'm trying to come up with a scoring system for this because if something better than pop-con is found, I'll take it, and was thinking CnR. But we've already had a "Outgolf the cops" post and that gets into is it/isn't it a duplicate?

New Sandboxed Posts

9:26 PM

0

We're much closer than you think Martin Ender's 2D programming language Alice has two different modes depending on what orientation the IP has: orthogonal (Cardinal mode) or diagonal (Ordinal mode). Commands in Alice change their meaning depending on which mode the program is in when their execut...