How would we score changing the colors of graphs in Desmos in [graphical-output] challenges with color-sensitive output? Currently, selecting the color in the menu costs no bytes as no characters are used to do it. This has raised some concerns about being "unfair" when competing with languages where the color is defined in the text.
Should there be a penalty for setting the color of a graph? If so, what should the penalty be?
As defined here, there is no way to encode the color. This means that the color of the graph is not part of the language, similar to how setting the default font color in my terminal settings isn't part of bash.
If color is required as part of the answer, then there must be a way to encode this color in a way that the website understands. For example, if the site is able to save/load the graph (including colors) from the browser cache, you can use that as your code (and you would measure the byte count of the saved data).
#rrggbb.
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Apr 23, 2019 at 17:16
If no colors are defined in the code, that would be 6 options, minimally represented in 3 bits. If more than two and at most 10 colors are defined. then each expression with a color chosen would have a penalty of 4 bits. With more than 10 colors, and at most 26 colors, the penalty would be 5 bits, and so on.
Colours are often represented with RGB values and hex values. These would take 3 bytes to store the colour data.
