The Nineteenth Byte

I like the conflict of wanting to move a particular person from one chair to another, with the desire to get another turn after this one by emptying a chair next to a team mate

cjfaure

so then, you already know where they all are when it starts :P

Nathan Merrill

you know where your team is, yes

but you don't know their IDs

cjfaure

uh, yes you do

Rainbolt

Not until you call them for the first time.

cjfaure

6:05 PM

you need to know your own id, and you control all your team members

Rainbolt

OH haha. Cj has a point.

Martin Büttner

so if the teams are 1 and 2, is the initial layout like this?
team:    1 2 1 2 1 _ 2 1 2 1 2
special: S S _ _ _ _ _ _ _ S S

Nathan Merrill

each instance of your team cannot communicate

Geobits

I assume you can't call your own number?

cjfaure

@NathanMerrill yes, but your own turn is perpetual

Nathan Merrill

6:06 PM

you can call your own number, but its not as useful as you think

cjfaure

by moving the other team's members to elongate your turn and figure out the other ids,

you figure out all the ids in 4 turns

without giving up your control

Nathan Merrill

That is really tough

because you have to have 4 people on your team sitting next to each other

AND they all have to know the ID of the person to move

the layout looks like this:

1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 _
S S S S _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Rainbolt

@NathanMerrill How will you prevent communication while also allowing save state?

Nathan Merrill

the chair next to the special chairs is the most powerful

Martin Büttner

oh so the special chairs are next to the initially empty one

Nathan Merrill

6:08 PM

I don't allow save state

Rainbolt

If I cannot save state, how will I remember the IDs that were called?

Nathan Merrill

5 programs that continuously run from each team

Rainbolt

I won't even be able to remember the IDs that I called.

cjfaure

so the ids are random?

Nathan Merrill

randomly assigned. They'll probably be 0-9

cjfaure

6:09 PM

@Rainbolt you're told your id on the first turn you take, you can save state whatever you want

Rainbolt

Well he said you can't save state, but I get what he means now.

You can't save state outside of the state that is saved while running.

cjfaure

the problem with this is that the team who takes the first turn can win without even giving the other team an opportunity

Rainbolt

Can I write five different programs? Maybe I want to assign a leader and four followers.

Martin Büttner

@cjfaure how?

Nathan Merrill

CJ impossible

Rainbolt, yes

cjfaure

6:11 PM

if you know all your team's ids, you can get all your teammates on the special chairs without letting the other team have a turn

Martin Büttner

@NathanMerrill nice

cjfaure

right?

Martin Büttner

@cjfaure but you don't

Nathan Merrill

If I move my own teammate, then the other team gets a turn

cjfaure

so the team to take the first turn figures out all the team ids in 5 turns

on the 5th turn, they can know all the ids

Nathan Merrill

6:11 PM

because the person who calls the ID is the person to the right of the empty chair

cjfaure

the other team would have figured it out the turn after

Nathan Merrill

you have to have all of your teammates sitting next to each other

Rainbolt

@NathanMerrill I think you have reached the point where you can write up a solid spec. All of this discussion might get lost if you don't start writing, which will lead to people asking you the same question a second time.

Nathan Merrill

ok

well, I'm about to take a final, but I'll start it up when I get home

bye!

Rainbolt

Good luck!

Unless it's a theater final, in which case, break a leg.

cjfaure

6:12 PM

rubber duck debugging works well on koths anyway :P

Sp3000

6:23 PM

I almost have a 25/26 for Pyth but I don't know how to read in newlines :/

Optimizer

yeah

Pyth can't

( at least the online version.) and passing "\n" is treated as 2 characters

Martin Büttner

can't you define a function?

Sp3000

Can't figure out how to test it to make sure it works :/

I'll try CJam

Optimizer

@Sp3000 are you using transliterate in Pyth ?

(in that 25/26 version)

Sp3000

Er... nope. I did essentially what's in my Python one, just with something else to index

Or at least that's what I tried to do

(just read your CJam solution, not having inbuilts makes it hard...)

Optimizer

6:34 PM

well, if transliterate worked, I would have had 22/23 byte solution

not having inbuilts ?

@FryAmTheEggman played around with the new transliterate X in Pyth ?

FryAmTheEggman

@Sp3000 There are some bugs in Pyth right now

Yeah its broken

Optimizer

:(

Sp3000

Inbuilt split

Er... is there any way to assign a multiline string to a variable?

Optimizer

@Sp3000 / is the split

FryAmTheEggman

I've been meaning to tell isaac he just wrote lambda: lambda: basically :P

Sp3000

6:36 PM

I mean Python splits by lengths of whitespace, but you had to built up the string :/

FryAmTheEggman

For the multiline thing, you had to use \n in the input before, but right now the online eval is busted

Optimizer

:D

well done isaacg :)

FryAmTheEggman

I think Isaac was trying to prevent evil people from breaking his comp :P

Optimizer

its not his comp

FryAmTheEggman

If you download it using \n should work

well the MIT one that he is hosting it on :P

The online compiler is different (i.e. doesn't let you use $)

Optimizer

6:38 PM

@Sp3000 So python can directly split on multiple continuous occurrences of a group of characters ?

"abd \n 123".split(" \n") == ["abc", "123"] ?

Sp3000

Yeah

Gets rid of leading/trailing whitespace too

Optimizer

@FryAmTheEggman it does. (at least it did)

Sp3000

Er, you don't need an argument in the split

It's just .split()

Optimizer

split on what ?

FryAmTheEggman

Oh, we are allowed to use split?

Sp3000

6:39 PM

If split is called with no arguments it splits on runs of whitespace

Martin Büttner

@FryAmTheEggman yes

Optimizer

nice!

Sp3000

@FryAmTheEggman Yeah, hence me trying to use Pyth

FryAmTheEggman

Also it doesn't in the newest version, he added the "safety measures" recently :P

Optimizer

@FryAmTheEggman he changed that last minute

(martin)

FryAmTheEggman

6:40 PM

@Sp3000 Yeah just write it appropriately and I'll test it with the downloaded one

Or something

Sp3000

Well for reference the idea was @[lf}T(bdC9)z cz))-l(0 0)1

Basically (0 0) length 2 array -> (00) length 1 array

Or something

FryAmTheEggman

You can use a space to prevent automatic printing

Optimizer

@MartinBüttner is the input string guaranteed to be consisted of printable ascii ? (except for tab)

Martin Büttner

@Optimizer yes printable ascii + newlines + tabs

Optimizer

newlines are printable though :P

Martin Büttner

6:43 PM

I don't think so

I think printable ascii is strictly 0x20 to 0x7E

newlines are control characters

ASCII

ASCII (/ˈæski/ ASS-kee), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character-encoding scheme. Originally based on the English alphabet, it encodes 128 specified characters into 7-bit binary integers as shown by the ASCII chart on the right. The characters encoded are numbers 0 to 9, lowercase letters a to z, uppercase letters A to Z, basic punctuation symbols, control codes that originated with Teletype machines, and a space. For example, lowercase j would become binary 1101010 and decimal 106. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and...

Optimizer

I meant just "printable"

FryAmTheEggman

@Sp3000 ` lf}T(bdC9)z cz`

Martin Büttner

lol, love the pronunciation guide...

FryAmTheEggman

remove the first space for count, second space for split...

Optimizer

wow that's short.

You should post it yourself.

Sp3000

6:45 PM

Oh, you can do that? (I really still don't get how Pyth works)

FryAmTheEggman

Yeah 90% of what I had yesterday was just writing split

Pyth will automatically print any evaluated statement, but a leading space suppresses that behaviour

cjfaure

i always said ascii as "ahsee"

Optimizer

@FryAmTheEggman writing split on my own was just 10 bytes extra

cjfaure

"asky" is so weird D:

FryAmTheEggman

Yeah its way easier is stack based languages :P

Sp3000

6:47 PM

Well I meant I can't tell whether a function does the right thing because I'm never sure how to test it :P

Optimizer

that last minute built in allowing ruined everything XD

Curse you @MartinBüttner . That was never in the sandbox.

:P

Martin Büttner

yeah I forgot to edit that out

Sp3000

To be fair, it was in the Sandbox... for 5 minutes :P

Martin Büttner

I already decided that two days ago

Optimizer

as far as I saw, sandbox always had no built ins to split

cjfaure

6:48 PM

2 things are abundant in sandboxes

rough questions, and your neighbor's cat litter

Optimizer

and as far as I can see, it was to prevent Python only.

Martin Büttner

@Optimizer no it wasn't to prevent anything in particular

in fact, I would have thought that most built-in splits would actually return empty strings at least at the beginning

FryAmTheEggman

I've never seen a built-in split return any empty strings :P

Martin Büttner

@FryAmTheEggman have you used other languages than python? :P

FryAmTheEggman

Well... Maybeee..... (I actually have used C# and Java)

Martin Büttner

6:53 PM

in Java, split returns empty strings at the beginning

(but omits them at the end by default)

FryAmTheEggman

Oh wow. Didn't know that :P

Martin Büttner

.NET returns all empty strings

FryAmTheEggman

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT

Martin Büttner

ruby doesn't

FryAmTheEggman

Oh shoot you're right, i remember having to use linq to get rid of them now...

I guess I was lying

:X

Martin Büttner

6:56 PM

I think PHP returns them too

I mean, it usually makes more sense

e.g. if you have CSV data with empty fields

Sp3000

Speaking of builtins, I just found another one in Python :D

Optimizer

isspace returns true for new line and tabs too ?

Sp3000

Yup

(just tried)

Optimizer

....

Sp3000

Python's also got isdigit(), isalpha(), isupper(), islower() and isalnum()

FryAmTheEggman

7:00 PM

was that renamed in 3 to iswhitespace?

Martin Büttner

hm, it probably also returns true for \r and \v, but you're lucky with my assumption about input characters :D

Sp3000

Er... no I don't think so

Heh, hence why I was happy when you said the printable ASCII thing :P

"Whitespace characters are those characters defined in the Unicode character database as “Other” or “Separator” and those with bidirectional property being one of “WS”, “B”, or “S”."

Optimizer

I vote for disabling builtins again

Sp3000

(From Python 3 doc)

FryAmTheEggman

Oops, I was looking in builtins XD

Rainbolt

7:04 PM

[This post](http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/general-discussion-30/winter-steam-sale-when-does-it-start-564697/) is hilarious.
Q: Winter Steam Sale, When does it start?
A: The moment you let your guard down.

3

Martin Büttner

xD

Rainbolt

Ugh why no worky linky

FryAmTheEggman

Brackets backwards

[]()

Rainbolt

That's how I had it...

Oh wow.

Look at the transcript

FryAmTheEggman

... ._.'

Rainbolt

7:06 PM

Whatev. If it works in the transcript then I won't bother fixing it.

Martin Büttner

@Rainbolt multiline -> no markdown

@PeterTaylor can you close things as duplicates of duplicates? o.O

FryAmTheEggman

I think he means how he can instantly close code golf dupes

:P

Martin Büttner

yeah I know he does

FryAmTheEggman

Oh, I get it now

Martin Büttner

but I didn't think that was a valid dupe target in the first place

Rainbolt

7:13 PM

If a dupe was a valid target, then you could close two questions as dupes of each other.

Martin Büttner

well maybe you can as long as you don't create cycles

(although I doubt that the system is that flexible)

Rainbolt

We could create a graph so large that the system crumbles.

FryAmTheEggman

@MartinBüttner are we allowed to require input formatting (for whitespace challenge)?

Optimizer

wow, someone just downvoted the CJam entry, like golfing language has any benefit in that challenge anymore

Martin Büttner

@FryAmTheEggman what do you mean by that?

Optimizer

7:18 PM

people are amazing, upvoting invalid C answer -_-

FryAmTheEggman

Because of how python takes input, the " and ' characters are unfriendly, can I require """ before and after input?

So like """hello "
world" can't"""

Martin Büttner

does that matter? isn't that just syntactic sugar for "hello \"\nworld\" can't"?

FryAmTheEggman

Oh yeah, is that ok too then? (i.e. require a python formatted version of your string?)

Optimizer

that is a normal string, not python formatted string

Martin Büttner

I mean sure why not? your input a sequence of bytes... it doesn't matter how that string was originally built/entered

ha, finally caught up with Calvin's Hobbies badges

FryAmTheEggman

7:22 PM

ok, just didn't exactly match your one example :P

also, congrats :D

Martin Büttner

@FryAmTheEggman which one, why not?

FryAmTheEggman

Well, you couldn't input `abc def
gh ij k` as-is. I dunno, some challenges have prevented me from doing that before :P

Martin Büttner

I think it's completely irrelevant how you build that string... for all I care you could do ["abc def","gh ij k"].join("\n") and pass that to the function. the representation of the string in the code that calls your answer has nothing to do with your submission.

Sp3000

Woops I had a string literal

Martin Büttner

not in the 117 one though?

Sp3000

7:31 PM

Oh true

... I'll put that one back on

Martin Büttner

7:44 PM

@FryAmTheEggman oh wait, you want to expect your STDIN to be evalable?

that's a whole different story :P

FryAmTheEggman

Yeah that's what I meant :P

I'm good english

Martin Büttner

if you take input from STDIN it should be purely the string itself.

I thought you were talking about function arguments

FryAmTheEggman

That's why I said input :P

Martin Büttner

sorry for the misunderstanding

FryAmTheEggman

np, I have a function one written, but it's much longer

Optimizer

7:49 PM

What's wrong in evaling input ? So in CJam, I can't do q~ ?

FryAmTheEggman

No, what I meant was you input a string of the characters "h" "\" "n" "o" to mean:
h
o

Martin Büttner

@Optimizer not if the input format doesn't allow it. you wouldn't put "abc\ndef" on STDIN, read and eval it. you'd just put the string you want on STDIN and read it.

i.e. if you read from STDIN your input should be a string and not the string representation of a string

@Sp3000 hexagon on hyper hexagon

Sp3000

:/ somehow I wish Python had more unary operators than + - ~

Optimizer

it had

Sp3000

:o wow you're blitzing through this game fast

Optimizer

8:01 PM

err Python

Martin Büttner

(and at 68 seconds in fact my longest time yet)

Sp3000

I'm sure if you redid Hexagon you could hit 120 :P

Martin Büttner

you were right though Hyper Hexagon was much easier than Hexagonest, and I was lucky not to get that one messy pattern :D

okay, this is a bit ridiculous now

I got hexagon on hyper hexagoner on the first try o.O

Sp3000

What.

Too fast!

Martin Büttner

died straight at 60:49 though :D

Sp3000

8:04 PM

Ahaha :P

GL with Hyper Hexagonest

Martin Büttner

lol

Difficulty: "Hardestestest"

oh shit

Stair 2...

Sp3000

GL, I say, GL

Martin Büttner

I couldn't even do Stair 1 (that's the pattern I luckily didn't get in Hyper Hexagon)

23 seconds... that's enough for now :D

Sp3000

I keep thinking "surely I'm done golfing now" but then my brain goes "nope".

Martin Büttner

lol

Optimizer

8:13 PM

@FryAmTheEggman Can we have newlines and tab in that string now ?

oh wait, that was issacg

FryAmTheEggman

:P

Optimizer

@MartinBüttner ++"abc def"b"gh ij k" a valid input string ?

FryAmTheEggman

I should get a GitHub account just to work on pyth :P

Martin Büttner

@Optimizer I'm pretty sure that's just building the string and then calling the function with a single string object. so yes.

@Sp3000 btw no one said your functions must be named

Sp3000

Oh... anonymous functions are fine?

Martin Büttner

8:16 PM

yes, they always are, unless the question requires a named function

Sp3000

Well seeing how it's not going to win anyway I just put a note in :P

It seems awkward seeing an anonymous function followed by 2 lines of junk

Martin Büttner

oh right

that makes me wonder what our policies are on submissions that define a function and also include code outside the function

Sp3000

Eh, actually I'll leave the post as is

FryAmTheEggman

Uh, actually, could you not have the second newline? Even though it will throw, you still defined the function :P

Sp3000

Hmm well I thought the idea for an anonymous function is you can insert it into code

Martin Büttner

8:23 PM

hm yes, that would make sense

Sp3000

If I didn't mind throwing exceptions, I could just have done <-1or x.split()

I don't like the idea of doing something then throwing an exception, then saying technically the job was done. Just a personal thing :P

FryAmTheEggman

yeah I don't much like it, but it would be sorta neat if it were technically allowed

@isaacg Hey, there are a few bugs in Pyth that I've noticed with X and the 'safe' eval

feersum

8:36 PM

I think either (1) the entire code should be an expression that evaluates to a function or (2) the code executes successfully, and after running it a named function is defined

Rainbolt

8:52 PM

Gah. I've had to change my password like five times in the last few months because I call someone over for code review after I go to the bathroom or something and when I unlock my machine I type my password into notepad or something (because it wasn't actually locked to begin with)

Optimizer

LOL

Rainbolt

If my screen didn't take five seconds to go from idle to active, I would see it sooner.

Geobits

That'll teach you to lock it more reliably :P

So will coworkers that like to mess with stuff, incidentally.

Rainbolt

I mean I could see it before I type enough of it to make it obvious

My passwords are ridiculously long, so a few characters isn't so bad

Geobits

Bah. If a few characters isn't so bad, why have long passwords to begin with? ;)

Martin Büttner

8:55 PM

@Geobits common practice at the company I used to work for was to send an email to everyone that "you" are gonna bring cake the next day

Rainbolt

@Geobits That question makes no sense. If my password were a few characters long, then a few characters would be bad...

Geobits

@Rainbolt I meant, if you don't mind the unknown part of your password going from X chars to X-F chars long, you might as well just use an X-F char password to begin with.

That probably still could have been said more clearly...

Rainbolt

But then you could apply the same logic to X-F.

Geobits

No, because I do care if people see part of my password.

Rainbolt

Eventually you would reach the case where your password is blank, and you don't mind people knowing that it is blank, which is obviously false, so your original statement was false.

Well I don't care if people see part of mine.

Geobits

8:59 PM

Right. I'm saying that means your password is too long :P

Rainbolt

My password is too long because other people seeing part of it is ok?

That's a non sequiter.

Geobits

Maybe not "too" long, but unnecessarily long.

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