The Nineteenth Byte

2:04 PM

the Code Golf wikipedia article lists us as "CodeGolf.StackExchange.com: Questions and answers on programming puzzles and code golf"

that seems a bit misleading

do people have ideas for a better description?

my suggestion is "Community for code golf and other recreational programming challenges"

ಠ_ಠ

Are there any bigger communities for code golf at all?

Martin Büttner

@Sp3000 ^ that reminds me...

Sp3000

Oh, that discussion

Optimizer

@ಠ_ಠ the real question is "are there any other communities for code golf at all?"

Sp3000

Shall we have it now then? :P

Martin Büttner

2:07 PM

uh, sure

so what is there (regardless of how big or their exact focus)

obviously golf.shinh.org

I guess I should start with the list on wikipedia

Sp3000

Yeah, so for anarchy golf: Accepts a fairly large range of languages, including esoteric. Updated with problems regularly. Popular, to the point there's even Japanese blog posts about it (!?). It only checks that the output is correct though, which can lead to exploitation of particular test cases.

I think the last point's particularly interesting, because some tricks which apply there don't apply here since we tend to have questions which consider arbitrary input (e.g. given an integer n, ...)

Martin Büttner

alright. are you familiar with SPOJ?

Sp3000

I did a few problems there but not many. I think the thing that got me most of the time there was timeouts.

Martin Büttner

so what is it like? like a deadline-free google code jam?

(plus code golf problems)

Sp3000

Kind of - it's a bit like anarchy (fill form with program or attach file) but less emphasis on golf. Actually, I didn't even know they had golf.

Optimizer

2:15 PM

Who is maintaining Anarchy golf?

Martin Büttner

the golfscript guy, right?

Optimizer

Idunno?

Martin Büttner

ah no apparently not

Sp3000

I see Mitch on a few "Best solutions" tables for SPOJ :P

Martin Büttner

shinh which appears to be short for Shinichiro Hamaji going by the email address

@Sp3000 what about HackerRank?

Sp3000

2:23 PM

Apparently I don't have a HackerRank account. Let's find out :P

Martin Büttner

heh

Sp3000

Seems like questions are split into Domains (Algorithms/Mathematics/Python/Ruby/AI/Databases/etc.) and you get points per question. Once again, fill in form or upload code.

Does HackerRank do golf?

Martin Büttner

yes

in Algorithms

I guess non-golf programming-challenge communities are generally interesting as well though

Sp3000

Ah, I see. Not that many questions though :P

Martin Büttner

oh, 4...

Sp3000

2:36 PM

I like how there's multiple choice questions XD

So yeah, as for other sites, I know CheckIO is also programming challenges (in Python), but they have the occasional golf challenge (if you remember us doing some in chat from ages back)

Martin Büttner

vaguely...

New Sandboxed Posts

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Pardon my French Relevant Write a program or function which generates a random swears-filled sentence in French based on simple chaining rules (some sentences might not make sense, even as insults, and some may have grammatical issues, which we will ignore). A sentence is composed of swear wor...

Sp3000

2:54 PM

btw are we listing code golf sites now or just general programming challenges? :P

Martin Büttner

I'm happy with the latter

Sp3000

Codeforces, UVa, TopCoder, Codechef, Rosalind (bioinformatics + some algorithms), Project Euler (maths + some algorithms)

^^ some from my bookmarks (not all of which I've actually tried)

Personally I like Codeforces for general programming challenges

Doorknob

@MartinBüttner yes, and I have no idea how

Martin Büttner

thanks

@Doorknob it looks really useful

Doorknob

It's just a buggy wrapper around several other existing scripts >_<

Martin Büttner

3:01 PM

lol nice

did it get shared somewhere?

Doorknob

It was (somehow) at/near the top on HN and Reddit at some points, yeah.

Martin Büttner

ah I see

Doorknob

3:17 PM

Hey look, my current reputation (25225) is a @Dennis number! :P

Dennis

Of order 2, it seems.

orlp

3:38 PM

@ell do you understand why your answer is flawed?

trichoplax

@orlp Looks like you'll need a superping to contact @ell. There must be a mod around here somewhere...

orlp

@trichoplax are you kidding me?

Doorknob

there's too many @ells! Which do I superping >_>

orlp

me not being a mod seems to be the exception, not the rule here

trichoplax

@orlp Yes - my chat screen shows all mods apart from you and me :)

Doorknob

3:40 PM

Is it this one?

orlp

@Doorknob yes

Doorknob

@Ell ^

trichoplax

Can you superping a 3 letter username without also superpinging every username which has it as a prefix?

Doorknob

Superpings work by chat user ID.

(@@<id>)

trichoplax

That's handy

Doorknob

3:42 PM

they just get rendered differently

orlp

@@59776 yo ♦

Doorknob

And you need a diamond :P

also

@ಠ_ಠ WHY DO YOU EXIST

3

orlp

@Doorknob fixed

ಠ_ಠ

Why not? @Doorknob

Or, alternatively, why @NotDoorknob ?

Doorknob

ಠ_ಠ

ಠ_ಠ

3:54 PM

Why would anyone question my existence?

Beta Decay

Why wouldn't anyone question your existence?

Optimizer

^ coming from a decaying particle

Beta Decay

D:

ಠ_ಠ

12

Martin Büttner

@Sp3000 do you know which of those sites have an active "community" in the sense of a forum or similar (not just an IRC channel or so)?

Sp3000

4:02 PM

Do you count per-problem forums?

Chris Drost

There's a tag:kolmogorov-complexity question (harder,better,faster,stronger) where the top answer is just a quick decompression method in GolfScript. The only way I see to improve upon that is to cheat by doing network requests, which is not specified in the question as illegal. Should I edit the question to forbid it? Should I post a network-request answer as an illustration? Is there already a protocol where tag:kolmogorov-complexity disallows network requests? Etc.

Dennis

Network requests are standard loopholes and implicitly forbidden.

168

Q: Loopholes that are forbidden by default

I've been thinking for a while that this would be useful, and some recent discussions have strengthened that belief. There are a number of standard loopholes which experienced question-setters seek to explicitly close. However, inexperienced question-setters may unintentionally leave them open, ...

Chris Drost

Cool. Is there any plan to add things like that (rules, I guess) to the main page's sidebar?

Ell

@orlp I still don't see the problem, care to explain?

Martin Büttner

@Sp3000 like PE?

trichoplax

4:06 PM

@MartinBüttner are you able to access Computer Graphics chat? I can access main and meta but chat just hangs with the loading message.

Dennis

Hm, making the loopholes a featured meta post is an interesting idea. New users are usually unaware of it.

Martin Büttner

@trichoplax yes

(I can)

trichoplax

@MartinBüttner Great - I'll just wait then. Thanks :)

Sp3000

@MartinBüttner Yeah, like PE. Other than that I know TopCoder and Codeforces have contest rounds every so often, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were communities centred around that sort of thing too

Martin Büttner

@Sp3000 well I guess general-purpose forums would be more interesting

orlp

4:09 PM

@Ell my explanation was incorrect

Sp3000

@MartinBüttner PE's general forum isn't terribly active, unfortunately. TopCoder's looks like it might be though

CodeChef's Discuss looks oddly familiar...

Martin Büttner

heh, thanks

orlp

@Ell I'm not so sure anymore it's impossible, I missed one crucial point

in that any interrupting algorithm will be completed fully before returning to a previous level

@Ell however, your answer still has a flaw

actually, the flaw I spotted is wrong again

maybe your answer is right

Ell

@orlp Yup, that's what I was going for in the note at the beginning. No worries, though. If you still think there's a problem, let me know.

orlp

4:30 PM

@Ell ok, I believe I was mistaken

the crucial difference that I was missing is that with single-threaded reentrancy any re-entrant will finish fully before the interrupted one will continue

Ell

@orlp No problem :)

undergroundmonorail

4:51 PM

guys

2

A: Shortest code for writing a string surrounded in comments (hashtags)

pb - 89 bytes v[4]w[Y!-1]{b[35]^}w[B!0]{t[B]vvv>>b[T]^^^<}v>>>w[Y!4]{b[35]v}w[X!0]{b[35]^[Y]b[35]v[4]<} This is the kind of challenge pb was made for! Not that it's competitive for this kind of challenge or anything. It's still a horrible golf language. However, challenges like this are a lot ...

my pb answer is only tied for last :D

the website that hosts my favourite brainfuck interpreter appears to be dead :/ it was up as recently as the 9th so hopefully it comes back

i mean it is on github so it's no big deal but it's sad anyway

Beta Decay

6:06 PM

Hey Black Hat

New Main Posts

0

Q: Code me some golf

I'm going out to play golf tomorrow, and I find that sometimes, I have trouble figuring out what club to use to hit a certain yardage. So I decided to write down my clubs and their yardages per shot. First Assumption: All holes are due north of their tee boxes. All of these yardages measure the...

code-golf simulation

0

Q: All possible orders of items of unknown type

This is code golf. Fewest bytes wins, only standard libraries, etc. Write code, in any language, to output all possible same-length permutations of all items of an array / list / object in the input format and any order, grouped in whatever way you like. The items can be of ANY type, as allowed ...