Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Question

This "sandbox" is a place where Code Golf users can get feedback on prospective challenges they wish to post to main. This is useful because writing a clear and fully specified challenge on your first try can be difficult, and there is a much better chance of your challenge being well received if you post it in the sandbox first.

Sandbox FAQ

Posting

To post to the sandbox, scroll to the bottom of this page and click "Answer This Question". Click "OK" when it asks if you really want to add another answer.

Write your challenge just as you would when actually posting it, though you can optionally add a title at the top. You may also add some notes about specific things you would like to clarify before posting it. Other users will help you improve your challenge by rating and discussing it.

When you think your challenge is ready for the public, go ahead and post it, and replace the post here with a link to the challenge and delete the sandbox post.

Discussion

The purpose of the sandbox is to give and receive feedback on posts. If you want to, feel free to give feedback to any posts you see here. Important things to comment about can include:

• Parts of the challenge you found unclear
• Comments addressing specific points mentioned in the proposal
• Problems that could make the challenge uninteresting or unfit for the site

You don't need any qualifications to review sandbox posts. The target audience of most of these challenges is code golfers like you, so anything you find unclear will probably be unclear to others.

If you think one of your posts requires more feedback, but it's been ignored, you can ask for feedback in The Nineteenth Byte. It's not only allowed, but highly recommended! Be patient and try not to nag people though, you might have to ask multiple times.

It is recommended to leave your posts in the sandbox for at least several days, and until it receives upvotes and any feedback has been addressed.

Other

Search the sandbox / Browse your pending proposals

The sandbox works best if you sort posts by active.

To add an inline tag to a proposal, use shortcut link syntax with a prefix: [tag:king-of-the-hill]. To search for posts with a certain tag, include the name in quotes: "king-of-the-hill".

Answer 1

Order of an algebraic number

Answer 2

Batt to the Basics

Answer 3

What's the Missing Code?

Cops' thread Robbers' thread

Answer 4

Wash clothes as quickly as possible

Answer 5

Translate Text into Matoran

The Matoran Alphabet is the alphabet used by many of the characters in the Bionicle universe.

Your challenge is to create a program or function that takes a string as input and creates an image of the input written in the Matoran alphabet.

The input will only consist of uppercase letters (A-Z), numbers (0-9), and spaces. You may instead take input in lowercase.

Glyphs

As you can probably notice, the alphabet comprises glyphs made up of circles and straight lines.

For the sake of this challenge, let's define each glyph as a circle of radius 4 units (8 x 8), with some internal designs. The internal designs of letters can be any of:

• Vertical Line at position 2, 4, or 6 (either full length or half)
• Horizontal Line equivalent to above
• Circle of radius 1, centered at [2, 2], [2, 6], [6, 2], or [6, 6]
• Any of the above rotated by 45 degrees about the centre

Number glyphs work slightly differently; they always have a circle of radius 1 in the centre. For numbers 0 - 5, the glyph has evenly spaced spokes between the circles, starting from the top. For numbers greater than 5, the glyph has an additional circle of radius 2 in the centre, and the number of spokes is 6 less than the number.

Here is a diagram of the glyphs in spec, any glyphs with 45 degree rotations have an orange grid.

For drawing the glyphs, any line stroke in the range (0, 1) can be used. Glyphs can be kerned (space between adjacent glyphs) any amount from 0 - 4 units. Spaces should be 8 units wide (in addition to kerning).

This is a code-golf challenge, so the shortest code in bytes in each language wins.

code-golf graphical-output kolmogorov-complexity

Answer 6

Get the trends of an array

Answer 7

Will this makina program halt?

makina is a cell-based esolang composed of automata which move around a grid. These automata follow paths of instructions that direct their movement. Your task is to, given a makina program using only the below instructions (so a subset of normal makina) as input, output two distinct values depending on whether or not it is a loop. (If program flow comes to an arrow character that it has already visited then the program is a loop.)

Instructions

• ^>v< These instructions (arrows) set the direction of the automaton to the direction they point in.
• I This instruction halts automata going up or down, but does nothing to ones going left or right.
• H This instruction halts automata going left or right, but does nothing to ones going up or down.
• O This instruction does nothing to the automaton, acting like a sort of 4-way intersection.

All other characters halt the automaton, as does exiting the bounds of the program. The automaton starts in the top-left corner going right.

Testcases

Truthy

>>>v
v<<<

OOOv
H<<<
v

Falsey

>>>v
^<<<

>v
^O<
>^

>>>v
v<I<
H>^
>^

>>>>v
v <<<

OOOv
H<<<
v

Answer 8

Sequence of integers not the sum of powers of earlier terms

Answer 9

Convert to Shorthand (Part 1, Part 2)

Answer 10

Modular tetration

code-golf math restricted-complexity

Tetration is the operation of repeated exponentiation. That is \$ ^{n}a = a ^ {. ^ {. ^ {.^a}}} \$, with \$ a \$ appearing \$ n \$ times.

Tetration grows extremely fast - \$ ^6 2 \$ would take significantly more digits to write then there are atoms in the known universe.

However, to work with big numbers, we can operate on them modulo some number \$ m \$.

Your task is to calculate \$ ^n a \mod m \$, with integer \$ 1 < a,n < m \$.

Rules

• You may use any consistent reasonable I/O method.
• The complexity of your answer must be \$ O(m) \$, where \$ m \$ is the modulus. In particular, you can't calculate \$ ^{n}a \$ with arbitrary precision and then modulo by \$ m \$.
• Standard loopholes are disallowed.
• Your algorithm must work for all values, but it's allowed for your program to fail due to integer overflow.

Test cases

The format for the test cases is a n m -> answer (however, you can take your input in any order) [Sandbox note: TODO - there's an error in my program]

This is code-golf, so the shortest answer in bytes wins.

Answer 11

Write a (simplified) BitCycle Interpreter

Answer 12

Convert Alpha-2 to Alpha-3

Answer 13

There's more than one way to skin a set code-golf number set-partitions integer-partitions

Answer 14

I want 8 bits for every character!

Answer 15

Convert Klingon romanization to pIqaD code-golf

---

Context

Klingon is a constructed language from Star Trek. It has two writing systems: a not-very-good Latin alphabet (with case distinctions, I being different from l, ...) and its own script, called pIqaD.

Task

Convert the bad^{[disputed - discuss]} Klingon romanization into pIqaD. Here's a CSV (the pIqaD [or, if you don't have a font for it, boxes or nothing] is in the second column and the Unicode hexadecimal codes are in the third):

a,,f8d0
b,,f8d1
ch,,f8d2
D,,f8d3
e,,f8d4
gh,,f8d5
H,,f8d6
I,,f8d7
j,,f8d8
l,,f8d9
m,,f8da
n,,f8db
ng,,f8dc
o,,f8dd
p,,f8de
q,,f8df
Q,,f8e0
r,,f8e1
S,,f8e2
t,,f8e3
tlh,,f8e4
u,,f8e5
v,,f8e6
w,,f8e7
y,,f8e8
',,f8e9

Be careful not to mix up q and Q, they are different letters in Klingon!

Input and output

Strings! or your language's equivalent. You can assume that the input contains no characters not in Klingon (incl. miscapitalized dhis) or numbers or punctuation.

Scoring

Lowest byte count wins, as always.

---

suggestions? :)

Answer 16

Generate Fibonacci Primes Quickly

Unsurprisingly, fibonacci primes are primes that are also Fibonacci numbers. There are currently 34 known Fibonacci primes and an additional 15 probable Fibonacci primes. For the purpose of this challenge, the Fibonacci numbers are the sequence \$F_n\$ defined as \$F_1 = 1\$, \$F_2 = 1\$, and \$F_n = F_{n-1} + F_{n-2}\$, and a number is considered prime if it passes a probabilistic prime test with a probability of being incorrect of less than \$2^{-32}\$. For example, since a \$k\$ round Miller-Rabin test has an error probability of \$4^{-k}\$, a 16 round Miller-Rabin test is sufficient to prove primality for the purpose of this challenge.

Submissions:

The goal of this challenge is to write a full program that calculates every Fibonacci prime and its index in the Fibonacci series as fast as possible.

Submissions shall be a full program, complete with instructions for building and running it. Submissions must be in a language freely available for noncommercial use and capable of running on Windows 10, and users must be prepared to provide installation instructions for that language. External libraries are permitted, with the same caveats that apply to languages.

Primes will be output by writing to stdout with a simple binary format, that has a little-endian byte order:

[8 bytes- index into the Fibonacci series]
[8 bytes- length of the Fibonacci prime, in bytes]
[? bytes- the Fibonacci prime, as a byte array]

Scoring

The programs will be run on an Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8365U CPU with 8 threads, avx-2 support, and 24 Gigabytes of ram. The largest prime that can be correctly reached in one minute wins. Tiebreaker is the time taken to reach the largest value. Programs that tamper with my computer or the testing program will be disqualified. Programs that error or otherwise fail to produce the correct output will be judged based on the furthest Fibonacci prime reached before they failed.

see also: A005478, A001605

The test program can be found here. Additionally, there is an example program here.

Meta

The test program is now completed and posted, but I still have a little documentation to write. I chose the output format to be simple, and so that answers wouldn't have to worry about formatting integers quickly. Is there anything I need to improve clarity-wise?

tags: primes fibonnacci fastest-code

Answer 17

Fill the rectangle

Answer 18

`lol` is an ambigram, `dad` isn't

Answer 19

How much more to a repdigit?

Answer 20

Answer 21

Enumerate all pure sets

Answer 22

Is it a heapable sequence?

Answer 23

Find the walls!

Answer 24

Interpret BigTalk

Talk is a language which takes a single bit of input and has four commands:

• 00 If the accumulator is 0, set the accumulator to 0.
• 01 If the accumulator is 0, set the accumulator to 1.
• 10 If the accumulator is 1, set the accumulator to 0.
• 11 If the accumulator is 1, set the accumulator to 1.

These can be interpreted as replacement commands. We're going to extend that concept to positive integers, and make the language more complicated.

The language we're going to be defining is called BigTalk. It has an accumulator, which is a list of positive integers, initially set to only the input.

Programs are a series of commands. Each command is a pair of lists of integers, like ([24, 2], [32, 1]), and means to replace the first as a sequence with the second, as many times as it occurs.

The program runs repeatedly until the accumulator does not change. Finally, the accumulator is output.

For example, with the input [5, 5, 5, 5] and the program ([5, 5], [3, 2, 1]), ([3], [5]), ([2, 1, 5], [5, 1, 2]), the list goes:

[5, 5, 5, 5]
[3, 2, 1, 3, 2, 1]
[5, 2, 1, 5, 2, 1]
[5, 5, 1, 2, 2, 1]
[3, 2, 1, 1, 2, 2, 1]
[5, 2, 1, 1, 2, 2, 1]

Your challenge is to interpret this language. You may take input and program in any reasonable format.

This is code-golf, shortest wins!

Testcases

In the format of input, commands.

[5, 5, 5, 5], ([5, 5], [3, 2, 1]), ([3], [5]), ([2, 1, 5], [5, 1, 2]) -> [5, 2, 1, 1, 2, 2, 1]
[4], ([4], [4, 4]) -> Infinite loop
[2, 19, 13], ([13, 19], [2]) -> [2, 19, 13]
[39, 1, 23], ([1], [39, 23]), ([39, 39], [1, 1]), ([23, 23], [1]) -> [39, 23, 39, 23, 39, 23]

This language may be Turing-complete, and I have a +50 bounty for someone who proves it either way.

Answer 25

How far from binary?

Answer 26

Parse this handy graph format

code-golf parsing graph-theory

There's a great number of ways to represent directed graphs like the following:

Most representations are tailored towards being easy to work with, either for humans (like the picture above) or for computers (like an adjacency matrix representation). A middle ground I found useful in the past is this format:

        A -> B <-> C                A -> B -> C -> A           A -> C -> D; B <-> C <-> E

It is basically a condensed edge list, which is still relatively close to a graphical representation (good for humans) but not too hard to parse for a computer.

The goal in this challenge is to take a string representing a graph in this format as input and output a list of the graph's nodes and a list of the graph's edges.

This is code-golf, so try to use as few bytes as possible in the language of your choice.

Input specification

• Each node has a unique name consisting of alphabetical letters, for example A, b, or Node. It is also fine if you only support upper or lower case names.
• Three types of arrows can appear: ->, <-, and <->.
• A chain is formed by a sequence starting with node and then alternating between arrows and nodes, for example A -> B <- C or also just A.
• A chain may be followed by another chain with ; as a separator in between.
• Between node names and the arrows and the semicolon can be any number of spaces (including zero).
• Self-loops are possible, i.e., A -> A describes an arrow from node A to itself.
• You may assume the input string is a valid encoding of a graph.

Output specification

• The list of nodes can be returned or printed in any reasonable format and order, e.g., A, B, C, ["A", "B", "C"], A\nB\nC, ...
• Edges are represented as ordered tuples in any reasonable format, e.g., ("A", "B") or A B for the edge A -> B and ("D", "C") or D C for the edge C <- D.
• The list of directed edges can again be output in any reasonable format.

Test cases

"A -> B <-> C"               : ["A", "B", "C"], [("A", "B"), ("B", "C"), ("C", "B")]
"A -> B -> C -> A"           : ["A", "B", "C"], [("A", "B"), ("B", "C"), ("C", "A")]
"A -> C -> D; B <-> C <-> E" : ["A", "B", "C", "D", "E"], [("A", "C"), ("C", "D"), ("B", "C"), ("C", "B"), ("C", "E"), ("E", "C")]
"AA<->BB"                    : ["AA", "BB"], [("AA", "BB"), ("BB", "AA")]
"A;B"                        : ["A", "B"], []
" "                          : [], []
"   A   <- B  ;  C  "        : ["A", "B", "C"], [("B", "A")]
"A -> A; B <- B"             : ["A", "B"], [("A", "A"), ("B", "B")]

---

Sandbox question:

Given that this is foremost a parsing question, I'm tempted to drop the validity assumption and require answers to raise an error if the input does not follow the spec. What do you think, would that still be fun?

Answer 27

Flood fill by distance

Answer 28

Nest some addition

• There's a natural follow-up with the other possible addition operator, where the order of application is reversed, i.e. \$\operatorname{add2}\overparen{\underparen a}\overparen{\underparen b} f=\left(\overparen{\underparen b} f\right)\circ\left(\overparen{\underparen a} f\right)\$.

Answer 29

Is this a squashed series? code-golf string parsing number decision-problem

Given a string of digits, determine whether it is the concatenation of at least two ascending consecutive integers. (in decimal, with no leading zeroes)

For example, the string 7891011 is valid, because it's the concatenation of the sequence [7, 8, 9, 10, 11].

However, the string 54 could only be formed by concatenating [5, 4] (which is not ascending), or [54] (which does not have at least two numbers in it), so it is not valid.

(This challenge is essentially asking "Is it a valid input to Decipher a squashed series")

You should output using two distinct values of your choice to represent "valid" and "not valid".

Take care with leading zeroes: for example, 809 is not valid, even though it could be decomposed into [8, 09], because 09 is not a valid decimal integer.

You may assume the input does not start with a 0, and has a length of at least 2. The input will also only contain digits (and not -, so you don't need to handle negative numbers).

This is code-golf, so the shortest code in bytes wins.

Test cases

Valid

1234
7891011
293031323334
9991000

Invalid

54
66
28
3131
809

Valid numbers are given by A035333 in the OEIS.

Meta

• Is this interesting enough? (It was just a byproduct of Decipher a squashed series)
• Is my handling of the 809 case good? Or should I allow either output for inputs like that?

Answer 30

Is it shuffled FizzBuzz?