The Nineteenth Byte

Martin Büttner

14:05

gonna post RAAoD then

Optimizer

will you be going to change AAoD #1 ?

Martin Büttner

I can if you want

Optimizer

I am free, so I can also do it.

I almost had a rule based approach to construct the tiling ....

Martin Büttner

@Optimizer 51222

New Main Posts

0

Q: Random ASCII Art of the Day #5: Diamond Tilings

Mash Up Time! This is instalment #5 of both my Random Golf of the Day and Optimizer's ASCII Art of the Day series. Your submission(s) in this challenge will count towards both leaderboards (which you can find the linked posts). Of course, you may treat this like any other code golf challenge, an...

Optimizer

14:19

@MartinBüttner done

@MartinBüttner you know, there is randomness in snowflakes also.

Martin Büttner

I do

Optimizer

but its not the same randomness , like in your series though

Martin Büttner

well I did want to include a challenge on random walks, but I don't want to torture @Geobits more than necessary ;)

Optimizer

in a random walk, how will you give the criteria of each possible walk having greater than 0 probability ?

seems too much to me.

Martin Büttner

depends on the walk

for many walks it should be trivial to show that a uniform choice among the possible steps leads to non-zero probability for every possible result

trichoplax

14:27

@MartinBüttner Ah - make that 3 x 3 then...

Optimizer

@MartinBüttner given a manhatten distance based walk..

trichoplax

Would there be anything interesting about a non-intersecting random walk?

Maybe with a continuous range of angles?

Calvin's Hobbies

@trichoplax How about: Given a angle range and a distance range for each step of the walk, what is the expected value of steps to take before a self intersection (to some degree of accuracy).

trichoplax

Interesting - that's the opposite way round to how I was thinking (selecting random angles until a non-intersecting one is chosen)

The expected value question does sound like it should have more than one way of approaching it, which adds to the interest

Calvin's Hobbies

What if there is no non-intersecting one?

trichoplax

14:38

Good point

Maybe that is the end of the walk, and the output is a walk of whatever length it takes to reach that point

The expected value of that length could be another thing to ask

Calvin's Hobbies

The expected value problem might be more friendly on a grid, like where only left right up and down are valid directions.

Feel free to use the idea

trichoplax

Alternatively the challenge could be to produce one of a specified total length, so that such dead ends are not an option. If there is no non-intersecting next step, retry the previous step, and so on

Incidentally, I'm still working on a second BBBF player

It's turning out to be a rather longer function that I had anticipated, but hopefully I can get it working

If it works, I'm thinking of calling it Coffin Makers

Calvin's Hobbies

@trichoplax That might make cool images, but satisfying Optimizers point could make it tricky to define/implement

@trichoplax Cool! I had assumed I'd get no more answers

trichoplax

@Calvin'sHobbies Hmmm. I guess that's easier to prove with a grid. I'm sure it's possible with continuous angles but having to demonstrate it for each new answer would be tedious

@Calvin'sHobbies I intended it to be an early answer, shortly after my answer from meta, but I've been distracted by other ideas and also "box them in" turned out to be less straightforward than I expected

I want to get my BBBF answer posted before I finish my own Stack Snippets KotH about ants (QotH?)

Vioz-

What is an association bonus?

trichoplax

14:50

If you already have sufficient rep on another SE site, you get a 100 bonus for each new one you join

Vioz-

Oh, cool!

trichoplax

I think it's 200 rep on one site to get 100 on another, but I'm not certain

It means once you're trusted on one site you can post and comment and chat on others without having to go through the same process again.

Vioz-

Yeah, I just hit 200 on PPCG and got it on PPCG, SO and AskUbuntu

trichoplax

Cool :)

Martin Büttner

15:13

@Calvin'sHobbies does the distance range even play a role? wouldn't that just scale the entire walk up or down?

(of course, on a grid it does matter)

Calvin's Hobbies

I guess it wouldn't matter if it were scaled exactly. Like a distance range of [1, 10] would be the same as [10, 100]. But [1, 10] would not be the same as [1, 90], right?

Martin Büttner

only if the [10,100] range is in steps of 10

or are you talking about a continuous space again?

Calvin's Hobbies

Continuous

Martin Büttner

then yeah, I was thinking of [0,r] ranges, not general [r1,r2] ranges

so yeah if you allow general ranges, they would make a difference

Calvin's Hobbies

Right, then distance doesn't matter. Just angle range would be a good enough question IMO

Martin Büttner

15:20

as a probability theory question it sounds really hard

Calvin's Hobbies

Yes :P, my only approach would be to run a bunch of samples

Martin Büttner

oh okay, I thought you would ask for exact reults

Calvin's Hobbies

Then you'd have to work them out to verify. I'd do something like "get within 5% of the values I generated".

NinjaBearMonkey

@MartinBüttner Is it the usual rules for leading/trailing whitespace for RAAoD?

Martin Büttner

oh, good point

Optimizer

15:24

@Calvin'sHobbies 7

Calvin's Hobbies

8

Martin Büttner

I'd go with no leading spaces, and up to N trailing spaces

@Optimizer opinions?

Optimizer

@MartinBüttner umm . for ?

sorry, wasn't following

Martin Büttner

"Is it the usual rules for leading/trailing whitespace for RAAoD?" --> "I'd go with no leading spaces, and up to N trailing spaces"

Optimizer

No leading spaces that are not part of the pattern

Martin Büttner

15:27

well yes

Optimizer

I don't think that trailing spaces are even posible here, but why not just minimum bounding box ?

Calvin's Hobbies

Have people ever really abused trailing spaces? (I know I usually put limits on them but I never really care if they're there...)

Martin Büttner

@Optimizer well I don't know what people come up with. but N trailing spaces is enough for the bounding box.

Optimizer

@MartinBüttner umm .. no ?

N trailing spaces will make the pattern be like a rhombus, not a rectangle

Martin Büttner

I mean that you can use up to N trailing spaces on each line, but don't have to (and it doesn't have to be the same on each line)

Optimizer

15:30

I seriously don't see anyone (ab)using that :P

honestly, minimum bounding box should be good.

Calvin's Hobbies

It would be interesting to see a golf that gains from having thousands of trailing spaces

Martin Büttner

as I said, I have no idea what people will come up with, and having the option to add at least one space to each line could help some people. it's probably also slightly easier to explain

Sp3000

@Vioz- Golden rule of Python lambdas: If you're mapping/filtering a lambda, consider a list comp instead (for your watch golf)

Calvin's Hobbies

What's another type of fox or coyote like animal?

(This is for a challenge.)

Sp3000

Hyenas?

Martin Büttner

15:34

that was my first thought

but just a wolf? dog?

dingo?

Calvin's Hobbies

No no, needs to be cutsier

Thomas Ross

Deer? not really like a coyote

Martin Büttner

@Calvin'sHobbies coyotes literally look like wolves.

Nathan Merrill

hey, I need some help designing this cops n robbers: meta.codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/5372/20198

so any input is appreciated

New Sandboxed Posts

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

NP Cops and Robbers This is an idea I've had for a while, and I really want to get it to work, but there are some large hurdles. Hurdle 1: I need to pick a puzzle, preferably one that is NP-Complete. I think lots of Nikoli puzzles are good candidates, and I am leaning towards Light Up Cops: ...

Calvin's Hobbies

15:37

Nevermind, foxbot works

Martin Büttner

@Optimizer I went with variable trailing space. more leeway is better than less leeway as long as it doesn't open up loopholes.

Calvin's Hobbies

What's a clever portmanteau of "robot" and "animal" (or two closely related words)? Botimal/anibot are too vague or generic

BrainSteel

Beastbot?

Calvin's Hobbies

You can work "brainfuck" in there too maybe

@BrainSteel Maybe, Robeastimals, beastbotimals, hmm

BrainSteel

Everything involving BF that I can think of sounds vaguely illegal.

trichoplax

15:50

BrainFox?

Martin Büttner

@Calvin'sHobbies I was gonna make a joke about BrainSteel's name again, but then realised that would be a bit too inappropriate ;)

BrainSteel

Oooh, that's not bad.

Calvin's Hobbies

No, needs to be generic, fox is too specific

trichoplax

(I almost typed BrianFox)

BrainFauna?

Thomas Ross

@Calvin'sHobbies What kind of animal?

trichoplax

15:52

CritterBot

Quadrubot

ArthroBot

Fauna Ex Machina

Vioz-

Thanks @Sp3000 :)

Calvin's Hobbies

@ThomasRoss It should refer to these animals: human squid spider bunny tooth fox bat (this will make sense in a couple hours)

I like critter

trichoplax

Is tooth an animal?

Calvin's Hobbies

Yes

I say so

Sp3000

@Vioz- I'm golfing as well and while it's usually not good sportsmanship to look at and steal from other peoples' code, I honestly have no idea what on earth you're doing there

trichoplax

15:54

Then it is :)

RoboCritter

Critterator

TheNumberOne

@Calvin'sHobbies Alien?

Thomas Ross

@trichoplax critter terminator?

trichoplax

Wait I think there's some more here beneath the bottom of the barrel

Calvin's Hobbies

@trichoplax I like RoboCritters, I think I'll use that

trichoplax

Cool :)

Calvin's Hobbies

15:55

Thanks everyone :P

Vioz-

@Sp3000, I'm just converting the hours to minutes and.. wait, I don't know why I was doing modulus 721

gimme a sec, lol

Sp3000

I was wondering where the 721 came from lol

Vioz-

I think I started doing it to work with 24h time and didn't change it when I found out I didn't need to

Anyways, now I have it down to 194 bytes :)

Sp3000

Your a+b+c==1440 doesn't actually work, btw

Try 07:00 08:00 09:00

Vioz-

Oh, true

I should probably just special-case 4:00 8:00 12:00

Sp3000

16:02

Then you'd fail on 04:01 08:01 12:01 :P

Vioz-

You're right

goddamn it

well, special-case 4-hour gaps then

Vioz-

16:15

Alright, fixed it

Now it's 199 bytes :(

Sp3000

1>=(a-b)/240>=-1 that looks so suspicious

Vioz-

..you're right

christ I'm dumb

(a-b)==240or (a-b)==-240

now how the hell do I shorten that

Sp3000

... oh okay, that wasn't what I meant but okay

Vioz-

aside from removing parenthesis

Well it turns out the last statement was faulty too, lol

Sp3000

Well depending on what you're doing, (a-b)%240<1

But you don't have (a-b)%240 == 0 in there so I dunno

Vioz-

16:26

I'm just checking if there's a 4 hour gap between the first two, cause that implies there's an identical gap of 4 hours between the last two

so that's the look at the sun case

Sp3000

Fails for 07:00 09:00 08:00

I'm not sure why, but it outputted 09:00

Vioz-

I think I know why

one moment

Dennis

16:46

Man, these badges encourage some questionable behavior. If I had downvoted this answer instead of upvoting it, I would have gotten a gold badge.

Sp3000

Alternatively, you could have upvoted it 5 more times

ProgramFOX

@Dennis How so?

Dennis

Populist bade: Highest scoring answer that outscored an accepted answer with score of more than 10 by more than 2x

ProgramFOX

The accepted answer does not have a score of 10+

so if you would have downvoted, you would not have earned the badge

Dennis

I totally misread that.

ProgramFOX

16:48

It's the other way around actually: if you upvote it, you are closer to your badge.

Dennis

I somehow understood by more than 10.

Nevertheless, if I had a score of 20 and the other answer a score of 11, a downvote would get me my badge.

Same goes for an answer with score 20 and a question with score -4.

ProgramFOX

That's true.

Dennis

But you're right, my upvote got me closer.

Quick, everybody upvote aditsu's answer! :P

Martin Büttner

@Dennis I'm still waiting for two populists where the limiting factor is the accepted answer only having 8 votes or something ;)

one day...

Vioz-

Nice solution, @Sp3000

Dennis

16:55

I cost myself a Reversal badge on Meta once. My answer had more than enough upvotes and the question a score of -4 when it got deleted.

The fun part: I had upvoted the question.

Martin Büttner

lol, nice job :D

Dennis

I didn't think about the badge when I upvoted it. It was one of those occasions where Meta was more focused on being funny than helpful, and some moderator mentioned the [status-train-wreck] tag.

That question wasn't worth keeping, obviously. But I didn't think it should be downvoted into oblivion.

New Main Posts

3

Q: Rearranging Words

You should write a program which receives two strings as input and outputs a sequence of movements which rearrange the first string into the second. You should use as few moves as you can. Both strings will contain only lowercase letters and the second (goal) string is a permutation of the first...

code-challenge string grid

Dennis

17:11

3

Found it.

New Sandboxed Posts

17:37

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Extending OEIS: Counting Diamond Tilings fastest-codecombinatoricstiling I promise, this will be my last challenge about diamong tilings (for a while, anyway). On the bright side, this challenge doesn't have anything to do with ASCII art, and is not a code golf either, so this is actually compl...

Martin Büttner

17:48

I'm thinking about adding a tag for hexagonal grids (like the recent Settlers of Catan challenge or my older Kingdom Builder challenge). Should the tag also cover the hex grid's dual (i.e. triangular grids), like Katya's recent geese challenge?

Sparr

how many questions would get the hex-but-not-triangle tag?

how many would get a triangle grid tag?

other than non-square game of life, I don't think I've seen any questions involving a triangular grid (using the triangles, not the vertices)

Martin Büttner

as I said, at least this one

but you're right, you can think about all of them being on the hex grid where some challenges make use of the cells and some make use of the vertices

a single tag then

I'll collect a list and start the retagging tomorrow

randomra

should all of them be tagged with grid too?

Dennis

Talking about badges in chat earned me a chat badge. Makes sense.

feersum

obviously tags need support for inheritance

so we can put [hex-grid] and automatically have [grid]

Martin Büttner

18:05

@randomra yes

there's nothing wrong with having hierarchical tags

unless we want to redefine grid to mean exclusively rectangular grids

Martin Büttner

18:21

I found 13 challenges that will get the hex grid tag

can I get some quick voting by stars please?

hexgrid

hex-grid

hexagonal-grid

hexagonal-lattice

Sparr

definitely not lattice. lattice implies we're working with vertices and edges, not polygons.

hexagonal-lattice and triangular-grid are equivalent, and vice versa

Martin Büttner

bloody hell.

4

feersum

hexagonal and triangular lattice are the same thing

Optimizer

What the hell guys!

Sparr

@feersum I disagree

Optimizer

18:30

Can mods see who are spam starring?

Sparr

"grid" almost always refers to the cells, while "lattice" almost always refers to the vertices and edges.

they are the dual of each other, and apply to tilings that are duals of each other

chess is played on a square grid. go is played on a square lattice. squares happen to be self-dual, so this isn't a great example :)

feersum

Wikipedia agrees they are the same :P

aditsu

just call it marklar

orlp

BWV 582 - Passacaglia & Fugue (Scrolling)

►

aditsu

19:06

sup? ⤴

random Bach?

Martin Büttner

@Calvin'sHobbies nice job on that challenge. that's amazing. :)

Calvin's Hobbies

:)

orlp

@aditsu always

when you least expect it

SUDDENLY

Bach!

Martin Büttner

@Calvin'sHobbies btw, now looking at Foxbot, the animal you were looking for was a Fennec fox

aditsu

* gasp *

Calvin's Hobbies

19:09

@MartinBüttner Do you know how much I need to censor "Brainfuck" to be allowed in HNQ?

I remember some restriction about that

Martin Büttner

4

Q: Profanity in hot questions list

I don't participate enough in PCG to feel I should have a say in whether that community allows profanity in their question titles, and I'm not particularly interested in opening yet another, "Is the language “BrainF_ck” offensive?" question. However, the hot questions list appears on all the net...

discussion hot-questions offensive profanity

New Main Posts

2

Q: Translate RoboCritters into Brainf**k

RoboCritters (etymology) is a brand new esoteric programming language (don't bother searching for it, I just invented it). It's a variant of Brainfuck (BF), slightly more complex than the usual operator substitution schemes. Every program in RoboCritters is a rectangular grid of text that only co...

code-golf ascii-art interpreter brainfuck

Calvin's Hobbies

So f**k should be alright I guess

orlp

@MartinBüttner CENSORSHIP!

@Calvin'sHobbies Brainshag

aditsu

brainfsck

Dennis

19:12

Brainfuсk should also work.

Underhanded style.

Agawa001

look at the very constructive comments here

PhiNotPi

How about b****f***?

aditsu

William Byrd - Ave verum corpus

►

one of my friends is in there ⤴

feersum

Let's try spelling it with a cyrillic 'a' !

Martin Büttner

the problem is not "Brain" :P

Doorknob

19:18

B****fuck

4

Martin Büttner

:D

feersum

Throw in a cyrillic 'c' then

aditsu

@Dennis @feersum already done

(I checked :p)

PhiNotPi

*rain*uck

NinjaBearMonkey

Br*i***ck

feersum

19:25

Brianfuck?

aditsu

hmm, brainfork is already a language

Martin Büttner

@Calvin'sHobbies Hm, I think the interpreter tag is a bit misused there. Maybe code-generation? Although I wouldn't mind adding a separate tag for transpiler challenges.

something based on this concept of a 2D language with area-commands that can overlap could actually be quite fun and powerful if it was extended beyond just translating to brainfuck

Calvin's Hobbies

@MartinBüttner Yeah, interpreter is not totaly accurate. Didn't know we has code-gen. (changed)

Martin Büttner

19:45

@aditsu ew crashing for too long substrings urgently needs a fix

aditsu

huh? example?

Martin Büttner

"abc"4ew

costs me something like 4 bytes for robocritters

aditsu

ah, too long as in longer than the string

Martin Büttner

yes

Sparr

20:00

*****fuck

Optimizer

*********

PhiNotPi

Mar 30 at 18:18, by PhiNotPi

b****fuck

Sparr

@Calvin'sHobbies I really want to see someone solve the robocritters challenge in one of the solutions from codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/47311/…

Calvin's Hobbies

We need some more diverse grawlixes

New Sandboxed Posts

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Create a basic spell checker code-golf In this challenge, you have to implement a basic spell checker. Your program will use the first input as a source. Specifications You will receive two inputs, one is a sentence/paragraph you use as a source for your spell checker, and the other includes ...

Calvin's Hobbies

20:07

@Sparr me too

Martin Büttner

holy crap, 7 upvotes without an explanation and I'm not even sure I've golfed it particularly well.

Optimizer

that is not that rare

Sparr

I don't think any of the existing 2d solutions do replacement, unfortunately.

And modifying the languages to support replacement would be too late for this challenge :(

This is another situation where I want to submit an invalid solution to a problem, just because of how neat of a solution it is.

Martin Büttner

@Sparr especially overlapping replacement (although I guess lookarounds could do that)

Sparr

meh, I'm thinking of something with separate input and output streams

but even in-place replacement could work in this case, since none of the patterns match upwards

replace each bot with a copy of the bot with its top left character replaced with a sentinel character, then make a second pass replacing any non-sentinel character with an empty string.

and the sentinels with the appropriate BF characters

Optimizer

20:22

I am BatBot

Calvin's Hobbies

<\
 [[]]
 /\/\

^ Llamabot

Optimizer

That's more of a GoatBot

Martin Büttner

<\
 [[]]*
 /\/\

Calvin's Hobbies

That's better

Optimizer

<\
 |\
 [[[]]*
 /\ /\

Martin Büttner

20:26

nope

Calvin's Hobbies

Why is he cut in half?

Optimizer

"swag"

\
<\
 |\
 [[[]]\
 /\ /\

Calvin's Hobbies

Llamacorn?

PhiNotPi

(I'm trying to make a PhiBot and it's not working out so well.)

Optimizer

[..]
____
|  |

Calvin's Hobbies

20:36

@PhiNotPi Maybe you we're accidentally trying to make a PiBot?

Martin Büttner

simple:

(|)
 |

Optimizer

nope

Calvin's Hobbies

@MartinBüttner Double sided axe

Martin Büttner

@Calvin'sHobbies I was thinking that :/

Calvin's Hobbies

[\-/]
|. .|
\='=/

Martin Büttner

20:44

not bad

Calvin's Hobbies

Mouse? Cat? I'm not sure

feersum

Mouse.

Sparr

well, even with a trivial extension for search and replace, there's no straightforward way to solve critterbots with snakex

which makes me sad. brianmacintosh.com/snakeex/spec.html is a pretty awesome language idea

New Main Posts

21:07

0

Q: The Great Wumpus Hunt

It's open season on Wumpuses, and hunters from around the world are flocking to the Wumpus Caves to try to get rich of off valuable Wumpus Pelts. The Game Based on the classic Hunt the Wumpus game, with a few variations. The Map A dodecahedron. There are 20 rooms, each connected to 3 other ro...

king-of-the-hill java

Optimizer

[\-/]
|. .|
 ='=
  V

Martin Büttner

21:30

the site-life-cycle-terminology-brawl continues:

3

Q: Can we do something about the "graduated" label?

This question arose from discussion on Can we do something about the "beta" label?. Sites fall into three main categories: Young betas that are still very much in beta. Consensus seems to be that these should be labelled "beta". Long-running betas that probably aren't going to graduate. That...

discussion beta-phase graduating-sites

New Main Posts

0

Q: Read numbers in the base of the largest digit and write it using underscores

This isn't as much a "challenge" as "a unique problem that there are no built-in functions to solve." Basically, you need to do this: Read some lines of numbers from stdin. These lines may contain trailing or preceding whitespace, and there may be empty lines. This: 123 456\t (where \t is ...

code-golf number base-conversion

Dennis

22:09

Why is it that 90% of all KotH challenges are for Java?

Martin Büttner

I guess it's faster than Python and more popular than C/C++.

Dennis

Oh well, yet another KotH I'm skipping...

Martin Büttner

what language would you prefer (other than a language-agnostic KotH)?

Dennis

CJam. Less competition. :P

Seriously, Bash or C. It's what I'm most fluent in.

Bash would probably be a bad idea for KotH though.

Martin Büttner

hm yeah I don't think C would be a much better idea. I doubt most people who'd normally participate in them know C.

Dennis

22:15

Python would still be OK. I don't know much Python, but is easy enough to learn.

Martin Büttner

but thanks for the input... I'm planning to tackle my first KotH some time soon, and I do need to decide on language/format.

Sparr

@Dennis the community has worked out some easy methods for implementing Java KotH challenges where each entry is a separate class that the controller instantiates.

there was a java koth a while back that I wrote a wrapper for so entrants could use any other language. it didn't get used by anyone :(

I wish more KotH contests were run in python or perl or another language with a good community-developed library of helper functions.

being able to just import a graph traversal or pathfinding algorithm is so convenient

Dennis

Not sure how many people knew about it. Personally, I see the Java tag and move along. No point in getting all fired up about a challenge if I can't participate.

Sparr

Is it really that much of a problem?

It hasn't happened much in the last few years, but I've never let not knowing a language stop me from participating in a challenge.

usually one of the example bots will have all the boilerplate that I need, and examples of loops and conditionals and variables.

bots/entries

Dennis

I guess I could give it another try.

Last last time I tried with write Java code, I failed miserably.

feersum

22:29

It has been stopping me recently

I can't participate in js-only KOTHs because I'm allergic to Javascript

Dennis

Aren't Java and JavaScript the same language?

(hides)

Sparr

one is compiled and the other is interpreted, but otherwise yeah. ;)

PhiNotPi

22:44

@MartinBüttner What's the question migration rules with graduated/beta sites?

Is is that a question on any graduated site can be moved to any other graduated site, but beta sites have specific migration routes?

Martin Büttner

23:01

@PhiNotPi I'll check later, but I think you can at least migrate from beta to anywhere else.

PhiNotPi

okay

PhiNotPi

23:35

I found an interesting bug (?)

Calvin's Hobbies

link?

PhiNotPi

I don't know if a link will work. The thread was deleted, which is why I couldn't get the vote counts. here is it anyways

Martin Büttner

Hm, we should make a challenge about boggle on a hex grid... But just plain "find strings in a hexagonal boggle board" probably doesn't add too much over existing boggle challenges

PhiNotPi

Do you think core is a good replacement for graduated?

(no reason, just asking?)

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