The Nineteenth Byte

12:09 AM

How to get 10 upvotes on an answer: See a new code golf challenge popping up, solve it quickly in APL, and post as first answer with some fancy MathJax.

caird coinheringaahing

@Bubbler love me some Mathjax :P

HyperNeutrino

@cairdcoinheringaahing do you have a link to that specific challenge? IMO i think it might somewhat depend on the challenge but in general I'd say that if a challenge doesn't explicitly allow something that isn't by default permitted, even if it makes sense, it shouldn't be used

caird coinheringaahing

13

Q: The Tenacious Thai Calendar

In the Thai calendar the year 2017 corresponds to 2560. The Thai calendar is always 543 years ahead of the Gregorian calendar. Observant coders will note that 2560 is equal to \$2^9 \times 5\$, in other words it has 10 prime factors. This will not happen again for another 896 years! We call a yea...

HyperNeutrino

if the challenge is particularly active, then it's probably best to follow the pattern the other answers have; if half of the answers use that ambiguous method, and the OP has never responded, I think it's fair to just accept that that's become part of the challenge, but if like 1 out of 20 answers uses it, it should probably be removed

if the challenge is dead and the OP is completely inactive it might be worth recreating the challenge and dupehammering the old one into it

probably best to get a meta consensus on this though. i do think old challenges have been dupemerged into newer challenges before? maybe only a few times

caird coinheringaahing

Well, I have a tab open with my fully explained Jelly answer, that assumes the comment question is allowed, I'm just kinda waiting for something to give me the go ahead

Probably the meta post I'll post tomorrow (or technically later today), but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

HyperNeutrino

12:14 AM

Probably post to meta. For now I'd personally say no; the challenge and all answers adhere to "use the current year", so posting an answer using input would easily beat all other existing answers on a technicality that isn't even allowed in the challenge

I think using current-year or using input doesn't really add or remove much from the challenge in terms of being interesting either way, and so since the challenge is "use current year", I think it's best to keep it that way.

caird coinheringaahing

I'll post a meta discussion about it tomorrow when I'm not sleep-deprived

@xnor Regarding this, I can't really answer beyond "I think it's harder and more interesting with the restriction on \$n\$, so I prefer it that way" I know it's probably not the best reasoning for such a restriction, but I reckon that code-golf will make it a boring challenge, but I have no backup to that beyond my experience on the site

Overall, I guess my reasoning is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it makes it slightly more difficult

Bubbler

@cairdcoinheringaahing Is it asking for full program, or is a function allowed?

Btw, I think there's an easy way to circumvent the n-byte restriction in many languages: reduce any list by cantor pairing function.

caird coinheringaahing

12:43 AM

@Bubbler As is standard, either’s fine

xnor

@Bubbler Good point that answers can just solve the generic challenge.

I think that's gonna be shorter that anything that used the code length unless your language is ultra-golfy and can do like n=2 in 2 bytes. @cairdcoinheringaahing What do you think if answers don't use n?

Bubbler

Exactly. IMO the generic algorithm will work in many esolangs as well as practical ones, as you just need some arithmetic, two (+ a couple more) units of storage of integers, and any kind of loop.

HyperNeutrino

1:00 AM

@cairdcoinheringaahing You might also want to specify n>=2. Unless you did in the post and I'm just blind. Otherwise any golflang's 1-byte identity func just wins :p

oh never mind you put n>1 at the top. i am indeed blind

New Meta Posts

1:19 AM

0

Q: Moderation: Handling flags and deleting answers

Since we have a full moderation team now and the load isn't all on one person, some of you may have noticed that flags are being handled a lot faster now. However, this has resulted in the problem that sometimes flags could be addressed before a user may have even had a chance to see the comment ...

discussion flags moderation

Lyxal

2:17 AM

CMQ: What's your favourite golfing language?

HyperNeutrino

Jelly :P

Redwolf Programs

~~brainfuck~~

HyperNeutrino

~~unary~~

(it always takes me at least like 4 tries to remember how to strikethrough in SE chat)

Bubbler

APL, except that it isn't a golfing language. I do know how to use Jelly (which is a remote descendant of APL) and Japt though

Redwolf Programs

The only one I've tried to use is Jelly, at some point I might try to use it again.

Bubbler

2:21 AM

I always say: "If you want to learn Jelly, learn APL first!"

Redwolf Programs

Do they work the same way, or are Jelly's monad/dyad rules more complicated than APL's?

Bubbler

Jelly is more complicated, but it is all for the conciseness.

Redwolf Programs

I guess I'll add "learn some APL" to my list of things to work on

HyperNeutrino

I tried learning APL after Jelly :P didn't get to spend much time on it, so I might revisit it, but it does seem a bit simpler (though since I'm used to Jelly I struggle more with it than I probably should)

Bubbler

Often APL and J suffer from needing to place monads at tacit-unfriendly locations, adding bytes just for syntax. Also it is common to mention the argument (or one of the arguments) as-is, which is like losing half a byte

Jelly's monad-dyad composition rules address most of these un-golfy issues.

Redwolf Programs

2:34 AM

I feel dumb. I just spent half an hour trying to figure out why my controller for Political Simulator was randomly giving out votes to people. Turns out the issue was that I used the same variable for three different loops, all nested within each other.

Bubbler

Lol, that happens.

Redwolf Programs

Does anyone else feel like the hardest part of code golfing (at least in high level languages) is keeping track of all the one letter variable names?

Bubbler

I use somewhat descriptive names before getting a valid solution, and then I shorten them (or remove them).

In APL, I don't need names for easy tasks because the arguments are always ⍺ and ⍵ (or not mentioned at all), and I use ^ for harder ones.

Razetime

3:14 AM

@Lyxal Still Pip

@RedwolfPrograms Always keep a separate readable version, then golf it down

Redwolf Programs

Hm, yeah maybe I should do that. I made sure to keep a readable copy for Hexasweep, but I never really thought about doing that for normal challenges

Bubbler

3:32 AM

It definitely helps in easier ones too, especially when it involves multiple major steps to get the answer

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