@dmckee I think I'm just going to close that question as a dup.

Nobody has answered, anyway. So I'm sure there's only like one person on the site who would give a toss about that.

@ChrisJesterYoung They appeared annoyed at my opinion about the task, though. Not that I care too much, honestly. The same person asked me to delete a few comments on his answer that would have helped them golf down his answer by a hundred characters more. Instead they chose to ignore them ;-)

@Joey Well then, they deserve what they get. ;-)

@ChrisJesterYoung I wonder whether I should submit my golfed-down solution as a separate answer ;-)

@Joey Yes, you should.

@ChrisJesterYoung minitech might be pissed, though ;-)

@Joey I have a miniature violin, which will play a tune for them. :-)

@ChrisJesterYoung Ok, I'll fix the remaining bug and then post it :-þ

@Joey :-)

Oh look, there's an @RebeccaChernoff!

LIES

@RebeccaChernoff Oh look, there isn't an @RebeccaChernoff! :-P

(;

@RebeccaChernoff I know only two people who smile while standing on their head. One is Rebecca Chernoff, the other is my gf. Since the latter is currently at work without internet access only one option remains :P

Hence 932603 is disproved ;)

|:

Don't you have ways of appearing here without appearing with your employee superpowers? ;)

hm?

Well, new users in a channel (room?) are announced in the bar on the right.

I could just look at the transcript if I cared.

hm, talking of different things, I guess :)

nevermind

goes back into hiding

I favorited this room so I would remember to work on writing a puzzle. So far, I've remembered, but not actually done >_<

Well, if you have a rough idea you can just throw it at the rest of us. Good ideas tend to stick and accumulate a few comments ;)

I had an idea for one, but then found the idea had already been done

wasn't going to use the same song, but still

That was a cute one, back then. Not too much interest in it but refreshing :)

Oohhh, I just had an idea, hrmmmm

@ChrisJesterYoung, @Joey: privatepaste.com/70b0d65893

Not sure if it holds up to the quality y'all are going for. (:

@RebeccaChernoff I like it. Now if I only knew a good way to approach it...

I don't have a solution to it myself (...yet, I suppose). It certainly requires some thought to do it right and fast.

Don't be shy with feedback to improve the puzzle. (:

The only thing I see is that non all languages have an obvious interpretation of "from the command line arguments" (i.e. those people trying to compete using javascript in the browser). For them I often use some language like "or other mechanism natural to you environment".

Or you can just skip it. It won't hurt them to learn something new anyway.

Joey has been pushing for question authors to supply automated grading as often as possible, which would mean a script to check that all the words (1) exist in the dictionary and (2) differ from the previous one in only one letter.

Ah, fair point. To me the point is that you should be able to specify two words, or pull at random from a list. I can just leave it as simple as that I suppose.

I thought about an automated grading, but I don't have a solution, so I can't do a bunch of tests and guarantee the number of interim steps I have is the best/minimum. |: Doing just the 2 steps you mention could work.

Question: Usually the puzzle connects two words of the same length, but I have seen variation that allowed adding or subtracting letter in various ways. Perhaps you should specify which you mean.

I added that to the specifications as well.

Yeah. Uh...I'm plannin on learnin this "reading comprehension" thing real soon now.

No worries. It definitely belongs in the specifications section.

@RebeccaChernoff missing code-challenge, maybe?

But looks nice, indeed

No idea how to solve it, currently, though. But that's fine :)

As for a test script, I usually appreciate something that works on Windows, too :-), even though the vast majority of the site seems to be on Unix-likes

@Joey Good point.

@Joey Don't worry, my issue will be getting a non-windows test script...I've been all Windows for the last year or so...so aside from being able to test a bash script, no doubt I'm rusty. (;

@RebeccaChernoff My bash test scripts were written by Ventero, not me, anyway ;-)

Although once I had the first one I could adapt my test-generating code to spit out both PowerShell and bash :D

Since I don't have my own solution, short of scouring the internet for examples and hoping they're using the least number of steps...I think I'll skip that and do what @dmckee suggested, just something that checks each word is valid and only a 1 letter difference.

Though, I don't have that written, so I either post now without it and update, or delay posting.

Probably easiest in this case, indeed.

is leaning towards posting the puzzle now and updating when she has time to write the validation script

A few people have done that and never got around posting anything else ;)

Not to imply that you would, but I've seen it happen :)

Well, which is worse? Not posting ever, or posting a challenge that never has a test/validation script? q:

Well, yours could probably work fine without one, I think

@dmckee: »Oh, come on. Code challenge to write a loop or comprehend a list. Whoop dee doo! – dmckee♦ 1 hour ago« – Thanks, now I don't feel bad for downvoting anymore ;-)

Whelp, too late now. I posted. q:

@RebeccaChernoff That's what I meant ;)

@Joey That'd be why I wrote the scorer for IPD in python despite being a rank beginner, who more or less writes c in any language.

Well, I can also do fortran in anything, too.

@Joey There is a sense in which I feel bad about that comment, but if there is never any negative feedback we will continue to see one trivial "challenge" after another.

And muntoo has posted a lot of them recently.

@dmckee It still doesn't run on Windows w/o changes, so that was mostly moot ;)

@dmckee Agreed. Both on the necessity of negative feedback and muntoo.

@Joey Damn!

Put it down to ignorance.

Is there a simple recipe for making scripts that run on both?

@dmckee You're checking for an executable flag which apparently is always false on Windows even for things you can execute ;)

@dmckee Not that I know of. I resorted to a BSD system I had access to.

And here I thought import os would know about such details.

What a sucker I am.

The greater problem is the interface, though. Even on unix-likes spawning 200 processes per run has some impact, especially if the strategy was written in Python

Ah...I did know that, and just didn't think.

Windows would do better with a persistent model, huh?

@dmckee I wouldn't have expected it either. But many cross-platform scripting languages are full of such things when OSes differ. Based on my own experience Python's popen3 or so didn't work on Windows either.

@dmckee Not only Windows ;)

I suppose I could learn Java.

But even that won't hide the thread/fork difference.

Sure, process startup is worse on Windows, but the python strategies against each other took in the order of 8 times the time of two C strategies against each other :)

@dmckee Do yourself a favor and don't :P

Having been on the losing side of platform discrimination in the past, I try to minimize the degree to which I am cause it.

Admittedly, I felt bad for posting my test case generator for Nested Boxes which was written in C#, requiring Linux users to use Mono (on which it runs great, though)

Hmmm...."$ fink list mono"...

Holy cow, it's there!

I might have to try that.

C# is fairly Java-like, except better in most aspects, though. Dunno whether you'd like it

It has pointers, though. So you could write C, after all :D

Then I could have the win32 API, or at least parts of it.

In any case, I guess most people like scripting languages better there.

@dmckee You can have that with Python too. import win32api

@Joey The things you learn if you pay attention.

[brb, restarting. It's Windows, after all ;)]

If you would just mandate that the warriors directory contains no non-executable files the additional test could be dropped. I think I got it working with that.

But some strategies use header files I don't have here so I migrated over to a unixoid, too

Random question: How many trivial tasks do we tolerate, actually? As for me, I find them nice form time to time as I don't always have a few hours of time to spend for golfing, but having the site swamped with them is probably not too good as well. But I wouldn't want every task to be on the complexity level of Robot finds Kitten, to be honest.

To the matter of trivial challanges, I thinking that Airplane Navigation at least requires some "which quadrant?" logic, so I haven't voted down.

I don't think we close the trivial ones except in the worst cases, but I'm willing to put my rep where my mouth is and vote them down when they annoy me.

I agree that no one whats to write a dissertation for every challenge.

@dmckee Well, I've downvoted tasks where I thought them to be uninteresting or bad. I guess that is what votes are for, after all.

There are probably still way too few votes going around on the site, though :|

Yea I agree with that.. voting down and commenting on trivial / lame questions is probably the way to handle it rather than deleting them out of hand