If a challenge says that input will be in the form of a string, what is acceptable? Various languages have different ways of implementing strings, so here's what I've "borrowed" from Wikipedia:
In computer programming, a string is traditionally a sequence of characters, either as a literal co...
Thinking about the Box outside of the Box
Everyone has heard about the 9 points 4 lines challenge, where the goal is to connect all the points on a 3x3 grid with only 4 straight line segments, and without lifting your pen.
It has been proven that it is simple to calculate the minimum number of ...
It's a shame that people are giving advice questions such a hard time. Any ideas what we can do about it, other than constantly educating people in comments that these are perfectly acceptable questions? Maybe for a while pre-emptively post a comment on such questions that they are fine?
@Flonk They don't have a spec either. I mentioned it because there might be some overlap in people who participate here and people who would like to participate in the IOCCC. But one size doesn't fit all, and it's good that there are other contests for people who don't like the PPCG setup.
don't we have a tag for challenges involving web requests? o.O the only thing I can find is internet which has only been used once, and the recent stack-exchange-api which is very specific.
@Rainbolt regarding Puzzle Pirates, as far as I'm aware the scoring rules are unknown, so you'd have to impose your own idea of what it's doing (i.e. how combos are treated, what a grain bonus is worth, a whole load of constants etc.)
PhiNotPi (I think) recently mentioned partifcle physics for a challenge.
I thought a bit about that.
I think drawing Feynman diagrams would be too complicated to get right.
Which mainly leaves doing something with combining the particles of standard model.
Which is more fun with quarks.
My first idea was, given a list of quarks check if they form a valid Hadron and print some properties (charge, mass, meson/baryon/antibaryon). But that might be a bit too trivial, unless you need to actually print the name of the Hadron (which would make it a bit kolmogorov-y).
The alternative would be: take a range of masses and a range of charges and output all valid quark combinations to form hadrons with these properties. How does that sound?
There are clearly some numerical issues affecting some of my favourites. E.g. X19 looks very different in the JS port and in the Java version, and this impacts a lot of the pairings with it too.
@MartinBüttner, complicated. At the very least there's binding energies to take into account.
Rosetta Stone Challenge: Run-Length Encoding v2.0
rosetta-stone code-golf string compression
The goal of a Rosetta Stone Challenge is to write solutions in as many languages as possible. Show off your programming multilingualism!
The Challenge
We've done run-length encoding before but only co...
@cjfaure I had 2 Dhows, lots of Sloops, and a Merchant Brig and Cutter, sailing is the good life ;) it's disheartening when you do a little bit of maths and work out that getting a part time job and paying for stuff is much quicker than actually playing the game for progressing, but sailing is all the fun
If the point of "write a function" is to write something that could be dropped into any code, then using it seems unfair. If the point is to shove everything that doesn't need to be in the function out of it, then it seems okay.
I don't know what the default is, but I've seen both approaches at times.
no I think I'd prefer the former. the function should work by itself (if put in a class, obviously), without the need for any other code outside the function
Probably, but if put in that position I should at least try to stay competitive, right? It looks bad to have an answer on top that's not golfed down as much as it can be.
OT: The chat flags that show up from time to time are hilarious when taken out of context. Just random blurbs of obscenity from across the network.
@Geobits saw that too, but didn't have an opinion about it... seems like something that could have been written in a conversation where everyone involved knew that it was meant jokingly
I thought about that, but concluded that it was less likely than a normal hash collision, so nothing to worry about. It'll overflow, sure, but what are the odds of it overflowing to exactly zero?
Yea, like I said in the comment, I'd looked at it before, but it wouldn't work. It was probably at some point in golfing where I was doing something differently and it would end up costing me bytes.
The goal of a Rosetta Stone Challenge is to write solutions in as many languages as possible. Show off your programming multilingualism!
The Challenge
We've done run-length encoding before but only considered runs of a single character. Of course, we can sometimes make even greater savings if w...
I believe the "built-in" loophole goes back and forth between allowed and not allowed on the meta post for standard loopholes. I like to say it explicitly if banned, personally.
At risk of being starred for the fourth time, I will say it again: If your challenge can be solved by a built-in function of some language, it probably wasn't a very original challenge to begin with.
@Rainbolt True, but if it can be solved with 3 builtins put together cleverly, that's a whole different story. Allowing/banning them makes a big difference there.
Well, I suppose my last suggestion was way too complex, so here's something else.
Blade Competition (Simple Card Game)
Certain RPG's include mini games that are quite a bit simpler than board and card games such as chess and poker, not too hard to implement and understand, but still complex e...
I hope this kind of "riddle" is ontopic in Programming Puzzles & Code Golf.
Give an example of a situation where the C# method below returns false:
public class Giraffe : Animal
{
public bool Test()
{
return this is Giraffe;
}
}
Rules: The code lines above must not be changed in any...
I changed it a bit so that it only works with newline-terminated though, so it depends on what you mean by "single line". I asked Martin if that was fine, he said yes. You should do the same and save yourself some 7 bytes or so ;)
Python, 100
I did manage to calculate the edit distance perfectly in the allotted memory limit. Sadly, this entry violates two rules of the challenge, in letter if not in spirit.
First, I have not actually stored my data in 1000 32-bit ints. For 10000-character strings, my program creates two 1...
I could fix both of the problems if I had a few more hours, but I don't :(
If a challenge says that input will be in the form of a string, what is acceptable? Various languages have different ways of implementing strings, so here's what I've "borrowed" from Wikipedia:
In computer programming, a string is traditionally a sequence of characters, either as a literal co...
Thinking about the Box outside of the Box
Everyone has heard about the 9 points 4 lines challenge, where the goal is to connect all the points on a 3x3 grid with only 4 straight line segments, and without lifting your pen.
It has been proven that it is simple to calculate the minimum number of ...
Rosetta Stone Challenge: Run-Length Encoding v2.0
rosetta-stone code-golf string compression
The goal of a Rosetta Stone Challenge is to write solutions in as many languages as possible. Show off your programming multilingualism!
The Challenge
We've done run-length encoding before but only co...
Well, I suppose my last suggestion was way too complex, so here's something else.
Blade Competition (Simple Card Game)
Certain RPG's include mini games that are quite a bit simpler than board and card games such as chess and poker, not too hard to implement and understand, but still complex e...
Python, 100
I did manage to calculate the edit distance perfectly in the allotted memory limit. Sadly, this entry violates two rules of the challenge, in letter if not in spirit.
First, I have not actually stored my data in 1000 32-bit ints. For 10000-character strings, my program creates two 1...
