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.

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Other

Search the sandbox / Browse your pending proposals

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Answer 1

The Language Relay!

A typical relay race only has four competitors per team, but where's the fun in that? Instead, let's see how many teammates you can cram onto the bus to the stadium and still finish the race. (This analogy is starting to break down, so I'll cut to the chase.)

Your task is to write a program or function in 256 bytes or less. It will take no input, and its output will be a program or function in another language. That program or function will also take no input, and its output will be a program or function in another language... and so on and so forth, until the last program, which will output the following:

.     \O/      .
|===== |_ =====|
|    _/  |     |

The winner is whoever manages to use the most languages. If there is a tie, the winner is the one with the shortest code in bytes.

You cannot use the same language twice, and different versions of the same language do not count as different languages. The output must also be different every time (no using languages that leave the program or function untouched.)

Here's a small example:

#include<stdio.h>
int main(){printf("print(\".     \\O/      .\\n|===== |_ =====|\\n|    _/  |     |\")");}

This C code produces this Python code:

print(".     \O/      .\n|===== |_ =====|\n|    _/  |     |")

And the Python produces the final output. I've used two languages, so my score is 2, and I'm going to lose terribly.

Answer 2

This might already exist, but through my search I couldn't find anything like it, so here it goes.

---

Find My Number code-golf

My friends and I have made are playing a game where we have a variable N that represents a number from 0 to 10. Using an expression they give us containing + - * / for addition subtraction multiplication and division, > < = for greater than, less than, and equal to, and the integers 0-10, we must find there number or what their number can possibly be.

I’m lazy, so I want you to write a Program that takes an input from STDIN or an acceptable alternative and return the possible numbers to STDOUT or an acceptable alternative.

Examples:

Input:

N+3>N*2-2

Output

1, 2, 3, 4

Input

N+2=N*2

Output

2

Input

N*4/6=N*2

Output

0

Because I might be caught, I want the program to be a small as possible in characters to avoid me friends seeing it, so the shortest solution wins!

Answer 3

I'm thinking I want to make a KOTH challenge that has bots play the classic game of Mafia. Bots will be placed in groups of seven, roles randomly assigned, and they play the game!

Explanation of Game Mechanics The game proceeds in multiple turns, each turn consisting of Night followed by Day. At night, each person completes his role as will be described below. During the daytime, players (in real life) discuss the events of the night (communicated by God, a separate person who does not participate in the game besides prompting people to their roles.) Just before night, the players have the option of voting to lynch another player, the objective being to lynch a mafia member to help the town win. Choosing not to lynch is always an option if you think it is too risky to lynch someone who might be innocent.

In real life, God would tell everyone to sleep, then ask mafia to wake up and silently agree on who to kill, tell them to sleep, and continue with the other roles in a similar manner. Town wins if all the mafia are dead; mafia wins if they at least outnumber the town.

There are four roles in this game, but I have played many games with more than seven people with more ridiculous roles that are very fun to play. Each player bot is assigned an ID number indicating his role.

• Mafia - There will be 2 mafia in this game. The two mafia will come to a consensus on who to kill. If one is dead the other decides on his own. The two mafia can not choose one of them to be killed. Mafia has a role of either 1 or 2, which are identical in function.

• Inspector - There will be 1 in this game. At night he visits a person, and receives a report on that person's innocence. Both Mafia members will appear as guilty and the rest will appear as innocent. He can not inspect himself nor dead people. His number is 3.

• Doctor - There will be 1 in this game. At night he visits a person, and that person will not die that night. Doctor can not save himself nor dead people. His number is 4.

• Townsperson - Does nothing at night. Numbers 5, 6, 7.

The Challenge

You will write a Java player class who will have (at least) three important methods: night, claim, and vote. All of these three methods will return the player to 'act' on (of course, depending on your role), given an ArrayList of information that the other players have claimed in public.

I am not very clear on how to run a KOTH challenge and what github is supposed to do and how to use it so it would be very helpful if someone could point me in the right direction. As of now I'm still working out the exact details of a Java class to run the game, as well as making a generic Player class that the answers will have to extend and use methods from.

Right now, I have a generic Player class that each answer will extend, and each Player object has two Identity objects: a public, claimed Identity and a private Identity. The private Identity will hold the players actual role (kept secret, of course), as well as a doctor arraylist of Integers and a cop arraylist of Strings. If the player happens to be a cop, the controller program will add an entry to the private cop arraylist which will serve as his way of receiving a verdict. I'll make a method called verdict() which returns the last element to make the programming easier. An example string is "4G" which means that player 4 is guilty. This player 4 may be mafia 1; player numbers are just given for discussion purposes and to identify a player based on his claims and is independent on role. Doctor is the same except integers because you only need to store who was saved that night.

The public, claimed Identity works in much the same way except that the controller will never modify it, only the player can. An identity object contains a role (an integer representing the role number), an ArrayList of strings called 'visits' (to be used if you are a cop or doctor, to store a list of people visited and any outcomes), and an ArrayList of suspicions to indicate that your bot suspects or is guessing that another player has a given role. It will also have a lynch value which can be changed during the day, and this is where a player decides on who to lynch (if at all). Finally, it will have a boolean for if the player is dead or alive. You had better not mess with this. The idea of having two is that you can claim whatever you want; so a Mafia can claim to be Cop or a townsperson and the doctor can claim to be a cop.

Initially your public claim ID is 0, indicating that you have not claimed. The program will give you your private ID, which will contain your actual role and and is not necessarily meant to be made public just yet. The program controller will only modify your private ID object, and only then if your are Doctor or Cop. It will append to the visits ArrayList in the private identity object the result of the visit; the doctor will have access to everyone he has visited, and the cop will have access to everyone he has inspected and their alignment.

The controller, each night, will ask Mafia 1 for his choice then Mafia 2 for his choice, then repeat, say, 25 times. If at any point the two mafia agree, then it stops because the Mafia have just made their choice. The number of times attempted thus far will be given to the Mafia's night method, so the code will look like M1.night(<other players info>, 1) then M1.night(<other players info>, 2), etc. is that arraylist of public identities previously mentioned. If no consensus, no kill. Similarly prompt cop and doctor once for their choice on who to visit.

In the day time, every player's lynch value will be 0, indicating that they do not vote yet; each player will be given 25 chances to act. An action can consist of adding to the list of suspected values, claiming a role, changing a role, changing the list of suspected values, voting to lynch someone, changing a lynch vote, etc., or more. Some actions are smarter than others, and your goal is to have a good action strategy. Upon each call of a players act() method, he will be given an arraylist of everyone else's public identity objects, as well as how many times before he has been prompted. This gives him access to what other players claim to be, who other players claim to have visited and outcomes, who they suspect as who, and who others are voting to lynch. If at any point there is a majority (more than half but not exactly half) of people wanting to lynch a person (No lynch, indicated by the value -1, counts too), then day time ends, that person is lynched and his role revealed. If majority voted -1 (no lynch) then nobody dies and day time ends.

Again, please guide me on how I should design my classes, controller, and what files I should put up and how people are going to test their bot at home. I would be glad to show you what I have so far, which includes a controller program and a dummy player class.

Answer 4

Generate a graphical representation of a Stern–Brocot tree of depth n

I am aware of this challenge. Would this be considered as a dupe?

Answer 5

Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds Shuffle

code-golf random array-manipulation

Background

The Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds (GSR) shuffle is a simple model of riffle shuffling close to how real humans shuffle a deck of cards. The well-known rule of thumb to riffle-shuffle a deck of 52 cards seven times for sufficient randomness is based on the GSR shuffle.

Algorithm

• Cut the deck at a position k, 0≤k≤n. If there are n cards, the probability that any given k is chosen is (n nCr k)/(2^n).

• Put the first k cards into one pile, and the other n-k in a second pile.

• Until all the cards are gone:

  • Where the sizes of the two piles are x and y, choose the first pile with probability x/(x+y) and the second pile with probability y/(x+y).

  • Move the first card in that pile to the new array.

Challenge

Input: An array of positive integers, of length n<1000.

Output: The array shuffled once.

Rules

You may use any algorithm that gives equivalent results to the GSR shuffle.

Answer 6

Play Chess with a One-Move Lookahead

"I see only one move ahead, but it is always the correct one."

– Jose R. Capablanca, World Chess Champion 1921-1927

This is a chess tournament with a twist: your chess engine is only allowed to look 1 move (2 ply) ahead. In order to succeed, you must create the best board evaluation algorithm.

Additional Rules

• En passant, castling, and under-promotion will be allowed. Of course, it is up to you if you want to bother adding those capabilities to your AI. I personally find these to be some of the best rules of chess.

I am considering making a "template" bot which implements alpha-beta pruning, and requiring users to just fill in the method for board evaluation. Otherwise, there may be ways to stretch what it means to "look ahead." The benefit for users would be that they don't have to write their own getLegalMoves() method.

Answer 7

Broken FizzBuzz - Greg Is Confused underhanded code-golf popularity-contest

(FizzBuzz suggested by quartata in chat)

(Related: Deletion of a blank line in source code which causes unexpected functionality, What? No error?, and Write a line in program that looks useless)

Meet Greg. Greg is the new debugger at your company, and he deals with checking programs to see if they work. If they don't, he tries to find out why and fix them.

Greg is rather new to programming and understands the basics, but still gets tripped up by some advanced things. Sometimes, programs don't work and he doesn't know why.

You don't really like Greg, so you decide to play a game. You create two nearly-identical FizzBuzz-style programs - one which works, and one which doesn't.

For example:

n = input()
if (n % 3 == 0) {
 print "Fizz"
}
if (n % 5 == 0) {
 print "Buzz"
}

works, but

n = input()
if (n % 3 = 0) {
 print "Fizz"
}
if (n % 5 == 0) {
 print "Buzz"
}

doesn't. Greg is confused (but not by something as simple as this).

And because Greg has a desk only a few feet away from you, your code must be as small as possible, so he doesn't catch on.

Rules

• Your correct program must accept an integer as input and return output as specified below, and your incorrect program must do something else (such as throwing an error or giving invalid output).
  • The valid program's output must print "Fizz" if the number is divisible by 3, "Buzz" if it divisible by 5, "FizzBuzz" if it divisible by both 3 and 5, and nothing if it isn't divisible by 3 or 5.
  • The invalid program's output may do anything else.
• Greg knows all programming languages to date, including super-obscure ones. Therefore, your answer may be in any language you choose (providing it was created before this challenge was posted.)
• You MUST have the two programs be nearly identical, except for one small change. The more concealed or insignificant-looking, the better.
• Greg uses PPCG and has participated in underhanded challenges before, so he knows about the C trigraph (??/). You can't trick him with it.
• Greg has also seen replacing ASCII characters with nearly-identical Unicode or abusing fonts, meaning that won't work either. Therefore, your program's change must work with all fonts, any may not exploit visual similarity between characters with different code-points.
  • Changing an a to an A is allowed, as long as it's not obvious that that's what broke the program. However, changing a to <unicode character that looks exactly the same> is forbidden.
• Both programs must be written in the same language with the same version.
• Your answer must include:
  • The language both programs are written in
  • Two programs: one FizzBuzz program, and another that is broken
  • How to run both of them (the commands must be identical with identical arguments)
  • Why one doesn't work (in spoilertext)
  • The output of the broken one
• Your programs must have a Levenshtein distance of no more than 10 from one-another. (Meaning that you may add, delete, or change up to 10 characters in the broken code from the correct one.)
• Your score is the total bytecount of both of your programs.
• The winner is the post with the smallest score over 20 votes.

Meta Questions

• Is 10 too small a maximum Levenshtein distance? I was also considering 15.
• Are any of my rules already forbidden by the standard loopholes? I'd like to remove them if possible to make the post shorter.
• Similarly, should I remove or change any of my rules?
• This is a code-golf version of this previous edit. Should I keep it as code-golf or change it back?

Answer 8

Rearrangement Inequality: The Sequel code-challenge grid

Read the previous version here.

Your mathematics teacher looked at your test results on inequalities. Not good.

Hence he decided to give you some homework on inequalities.

Since this is about inequalities (how unfair), he decided to give each student a differing amount of homework. The exact amounts do not matter to him.

After allocating the homework, he had a bunch of complaints. Apparently, some students have some neighbouring students who have less homework than them.

Hence, he has decided to rearrange the students such that there will be fewer complaints. As long as each student sees that at most one adjacent student has less homework than them, they will not complain. (The students are quite reasonable.)

Note that he can swap the position of two students, but he cannot move a student into an empty spot as the empty spot has no chairs and the chairs in this classroom cannot be moved around due to safety concerns.

Input

Here are different forms of input you can consider:

Optional: You can include integers in your input for the size of the classroom for convenience. This is code-challenge, so input and output does not matter too much.

Function input: Container with truthy and falsy values representing if a student is there or not. All truthy values must be the same, similarly, all falsy values must be the same.

Standard Input: A grid of 2 different characters, which can be separated by spaces. Possible input:

0 1 1 0 1
1 1 1 1 1
1 0 1 1 1
1 1 1 1 1

or

_@@_@
@@@@@
@_@@@
@@@@@

Output

The teacher wants to know how to arrange the students. Each student can be represented as an integer from 1 to n from the least amount of homework to the most amount of homework. For the input:

0 1 1 0 1
1 1 1 1 1
1 0 1 1 1
1 1 1 1 1

where 1 means there is a student and 0 means there isn't any students, a possible output is:

0  12 13 0  4
10 11 16 15 3
9  0  14 17 2
8  7  6  5  1

where the students labelled 16 and 17 are not satisfied.

Your score for every test case will be the number of students which are satisfied over the total number of students in that test case. It is guaranteed that there is at least one student in each test case. Your final score will the average of your scores over all test cases.

If you want to use another form of input and output, please clearly state it in your answers.

The teacher has some concerns:

Please ensure that your code is deterministic, as the teacher may test it several times. You are allowed to code your own psuedorandom number generator if you need random numbers.

Please ensure that your code terminates within a minute for each test case, as the teacher is impatient.

The teacher has been to PPCG for a long time, so he knows all the standard loopholes.

The teacher has a very large classroom (100 by 100), and would be worried if your program fails to give an answer for such a large classroom.

Finally:

This is code-challenge, and the winner will be the person with the largest score.

Sandbox Meta:

I still need to generate some large test cases, so I'm leaving this in the Sandbox until I have large test cases. How should I show people large test cases?

Answer 9

Approximate an image using all colours

popularity-contest graphical-output

I know that this is basically a subset of the then very popular American Gothic in the palette of Mona Lisa: Rearrange the pixels but I think it is worth making it a new challenge.

As @MartinBüttner pointed out, there has also been the Images with all colors challenge, but in my opinion it has very little in common with the proposed challenge.

Challenge

Given a image of 2^12 x 2^12 pixels as input, your program should recreate this image, but you have to use each of 8-bit RGB colour exactly once.

Meta

These are roughyl 12MP images, quite large. So one could just restrict it to 7-bit RGB then the pictures would only have to be 2^18 pixels, that means e.g. 512 x 512 pixels which would be way more suitable for the challenges here.

Or does anyone know a convenient other colour representation?

Answer 10

Make a New Year countdown

Editor's note: This challenge is cancelled because it is the year 2016, and I'm too late. XP It is kept here for posterity.

It is New Year coming soon. As such, it would be a great idea to make a New Year countdown. That is your challenge today!

Happy New Year!

The full rules

• Create a program taking from STDIN the current time and outputting a countdown until New Year into STDOUT.

• The program should be flexible - after Year 2015 has concluded, the program should count down until New Year 2017, and so on. See examples for more information.

• The program should count down until it is taken down by external means (using Ctrl-C, the Task Manager, the reset button, et cetera).

• The countdown may be formatted however you like.

• At the null second in the new year (YYYY-01-01 00:00:00), it should output 0 days, 0 hours, 0 minutes 0 seconds in your chosen format.

• This is code-golf, so shortest answer wins.

• The last rule: Have fun!

Examples

Given the input after from: the following countdown should be given, in any format you like (after to:).

from:
2015-12-31 06:00:00
to:
0 days 18:00:00

from:
2015-12-31 23:59:57
to:
0 days 00:00:03

from:
2016-01-01 00:00:00
to:
0 days 00:00:00

from:
2016-01-01 00:00:01
to:
364 days 23:59:59

Answer 11

Sig-fig calculator

As a scientist, sig-figs are definitely one of the most important parts of measurements and calculatations (unless you are a theoretical scientist, where everything must be exact!). Sig-figs is an important way of measuring uncertainty and accuracy of a value. To calculate the number of sig-figs for a value, use the following to help you (from here):

1. ALL non-zero numbers (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) are ALWAYS significant.

2. ALL zeroes between non-zero numbers are ALWAYS significant.

3. ALL zeroes which are SIMULTANEOUSLY to the right of the decimal point AND at the end of the number are ALWAYS significant.

4. ALL zeroes which are to the left of a written decimal point and are in a number >= 10 are ALWAYS significant.

5. Exact numbers in an equation have infinite sig-figs. For example, in the equation $A=pi*r^2$, $pi$ has infinite sig-figs and the exponent of 2 also has infinite sig-figs. (not included in the above link)

To calculate the number of sig-figs from a calculation, use the following rules:

1. For multiplication and division, the number of sig-figs for the result is equal to the number of sig-figs for the least accurate value (i.e. the value with the least number of sig-figs). For example, 2.000*5.00 = 10.0 and 4.5*6.00 = 27

2. For addition and subtraction, the result has as many decimal places as the one with the least decimal places. For example, 5.00-2 = 3 while 6.0-3.000 = 3.0

3. logs (including natural logs) have as many decimal places as the number of sig-figs of the value of whose log is being taken (I am not sure if this sentence of English is correct!). For example, log(2.45) = 0.389.

4. Other functions, such as square roots, exponents, sines, cosines, etc. can be assumed to have the same number of sig-figs as its argument. So the sin(3.14) = 0.00159

Challenge

The challenge is to write a sig-fig calculator with the following functions:

1. addition, subtraction, multiplication, division
2. sine, cosine, tan, and their inverses
3. sinh, cosh, tanh, and their inverses
4. Exponents, including shortcuts for e^x and 10^x, along with sqrt. The exponents are assumed to be exact and has infinite sig-figs
5. log of base 10 and natural log.

The result of each calculation should give you the correct result, but insert a "\" before the last sig fig. If there is infinite sig figs, there should be no "\" at all. Also, undefined and infinite values should give an error or NaN or print "infinity" or "undefined". For example,

sin(3.14) = 0.0015\9265292
log(1.01) = 0.00\432137378
5.00*2 =\10
2.00^5=32.\0

This is a code-golf so the shortest code wins!

Answer 12

Clean numbers

We call a positive integer a clean number if it is expressible by using only a positive digit once or more and no other sign. For example 88 is expressible with 2's as 2²22.

A more complex example is

$$141289730531295606313143345858933 = 3^{33}3^{3^3}3333$$

Details

The possible operations are

• exponentiation
• multiplication (only if the first part contains exponentiation as otherwise it is just digit concatenation)
• digit concatenation

Precedence is as normal. Power towers are computed from right to left (top to bottom).

Task

sandbox note: which one should it be? I'm thinking d) now

• a) given a number return if it is clean
• b) given a number return the digit with which it is clean
• c) given a number and a digit return if the number is clean with that digit
• d) given a number and a digit return digit-clean numbers up to the given number
• e) given a number find the smallest digit or digit-sequence which makes it clean (eg. 63504 = 252²)

Test cases

TODO
(11^1)*11
2^(2^2*22)

Your program should solve every test case in a couple of minutes.

This is code golf.

Answer 13

I wasn't able to find a challenge like this before, but it wouldn't surprise me if it already exists.

---

A strand of DNA is made up of bases notated by the letters A, T, C, and G. A always pairs with T, C always pairs with G, and vice versa.

Therefore, you can find the opposite side of a DNA strand by swapping all occurrences of a base with its complement.

Here's the catch: your program cannot contain the characters A, T, C, or G at all – in string literals or in the body of the program.

---

The input is a string of continuous uppercase characters (you can assume that this string only contains the above bases). The input can be any length. The output should be the complementary strand of DNA.

Examples

Input:   AC
Output:  TG

Input:   ACCTAGTAT
Output:  TGGATCATA

Input:   GCATC
Output:  CGTAG

Input:   TCTGAAACTAGGGGC
Output:  AGACTTTGATCCCCG

---

This is code golf, so the shortest program wins.

Answer 14

Format a list of words

code-golf

Your challenge is to format a list of words across multiple lines that are no longer than a given number of characters, so that each line contains as many words as possible and no words are unnecessarily cut off.

Input

The input will be a space-separated list of words and then a number that is at least 4.

Output

The output should be the input words grouped into lines so that none of the lines contains more characters than the input number. The lines should be output in the order they were input. The words should be comma-separated, and each line except the last should end with a comma. If a word is too long to fit on a line, it should be cut off as little as possible while following the other rules, and "..." should be added to the end.

Test cases

Input:
foo bar baz qux 12

Output:
foo, bar,
baz, qux


Input:
foo bar baz qux 5

Output:
foo,
bar,
baz,
qux


Input:
strength dexterity constitution intelligence wisdom charisma 10

Output:
strength,
dexterity,
consti...,
intell...,
wisdom,
charisma


Input:
quas wex exort 4
...,
wex,
e...

Sandbox questions

• Has this been done before?

Answer 15

Smallest Turing Complete Interpreter

Sandbox Notes

• Has anything like this ever been done before?
• Do you think this will be well received?
• In my research I couldn't find a simple definition of what makes a language "Turing complete". What alterations or additions should I make to the language rules? I would prefer that the language in every answer was not exactly the same, but at the same time I want to keep the complexity as low as possible (while still being Turing complete) so that ideally one of the answers would become the world's smallest (non-eval) interpreter.
• Are there any other loopholes I missed?

Let me know in the comments!

---

Your challenge is to make the smallest possible interpreter for a programming language.

What is the language we are interpreting?

You get to create the language! You can implement any instructions you like, however the language must be Turing complete. For the purposes of this challenge, your "Turing complete" language must be able to:

• Store and retrieve an arbitrary amount of data in memory The amount must be theoretically infinite, but your interpreter only needs to handle a minimum of 64 kilobytes (256 ^ 0xffff distinct values). The format could be an array of numbers, a string, a very large integer (if the language of your interpreter supports 524288-bit integers :P ) or any other format that provides the same number of distinct values.
• Loop conditionally The loop must also be able to alter the execution flow (if you implement a while loop that can only have one instruction in the body, it won't be able to affect anything outside of the while loop). This can be one command (eg: while A do { B C D }) or two (eg: if A then B and goto C) or any number that produces the same effect.
• Print any ASCII character This includes code points 32 to 126 inclusive. Newline is not required but being able to print characters outside of this range is fine.

It does not need to take input. Any extra features are fine as long as it meets these requirements. The language does not have to be pleasant to use, but each of these requirements must be usable in the real world.

See the languages here for some inspiration...

Input

• Your interpreter must take a single string containing the source code of a program in your language.
• The input will always be a valid program. You do not need to handle endless loops, impossible instructions, etc.

Output

• A single string containing the output of the program.
• A single trailing newline is allowed, any other leading or trailing whitespace is not.

Rules

• The only rule is that you cannot use eval (or equivalent) in your interpreter.
• Your interpreter must be a full program, not just a function. Input and output must be from STDIN, STDOUT or their equivalents.
• The interpreter and the specifications of your language must be posted in your answer. Make sure you include all details that prove the language is Turing complete!
• Your language can be identical to an existing language or a language from another answer.

Remember...

This is code-golf. Your score is the number of bytes in the source code of your interpreter, so design your language to minimise this score.

Good luck!

---

Sample Answer

JavaScript (ES6), 148 bytes

s=prompt();o="";m=[];for(p=i=0;c=s[i];i++)v=m[p],+c?c-1?c-2?c-3?c-4?o+=String.fromCharCode(v):p++:p--:m[p]=~~v+1:m[p]=~~v-1:m[p]?i=m[p+1]:0;alert(o)

Language Specification

Memory is stored on an infinite tape. The pointer variable points to a position within this tape. The index variable holds the index of the current instruction in the source code being executed. Each instruction is a single-digit number. The numbers do the following:

• 5 = print character ASCII code at pointer
• 4 = increment pointer
• 3 = decrement pointer
• 2 = increment value at pointer
• 1 = decrement value at pointer
• 0 = if the value at pointer is non-zero, set index to the value at pointer + 1

Explanation

Using numbers instead of letters for the instructions means I can check with c-3 instead of c=="x".

s=prompt();
o="";
m=[];
for(p=i=0;c=s[i];i++)
  v=m[p],
  +c?
    c-1?
      c-2?
        c-3?
          c-4?
            o+=String.fromCharCode(v)
          :p++
        :p--
      :m[p]=~~v+1
    :m[p]=~~v-1
  :m[p]?i=m[p+1]:0;
alert(o)

Test

prompt = () => input.value;
alert = (output) => result.textContent = output;
var solution = _=>{ s=prompt();o="";m=[];for(p=i=0;c=s[i];i++)v=m[p],+c?c-1?c-2?c-3?c-4?o+=String.fromCharCode(v):p++:p--:m[p]=~~v+1:m[p]=~~v-1:m[p]?i=m[p+1]:0;alert(o) };

<textarea id="input" rows="5" cols="70">222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222522222222222222222222222222222522222225522254222222222222222222222222222222222222222222225111111111111531111111111111111111111115222222222222222222222222522251111115111111115425</textarea><br />
<button onclick="solution()">Go</button>
<pre id="result"></pre>

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Tags: code-golf interpreter language-design

Answer 16

"Compress" text into Zalgo

Zalgo, the Nezperdian hivemind of chaos, is a type of text that uses combining characters to make very tall and noisy text. If you don't know what I'm talking about, maybe this will jog your memory:

<zalgo>




H̡̢̢̡̡̧̢̡͎̟͚̮͓͇̦̮̙̗̜̱̱͔̲̹̣̱̠̀̀͐̑̾̓̃́̃̍̀͆̇͆̽̔̒̚̕͘̚͜͝͠͠ͅE̢̧͓̺͉̟͙͇̳̰͉͖̺̻͕̰̱̝̳̙̰̟̠̯̘̰̲̎̑͋͂͑́͛̎͋̇̍̾̊̈́̂̽̿͆͛͑̽̒̊́͠͝͠͝͝ͅ ̨̢̟̳̥̖̺̼͎̩̘̰̣̼͇̰̫̞̜̲̰͔̗̠͔̩̻̳͇̾͌̆̑̍̄̊͗̓̃̆̊̄̽̐̂͛̏͑̒̓̆͝͝͝Ç̛̬̩͙̱̥̦̪̮̖͚͚͔̼̱̺̳̳̬̭͍̣͍̙̹̜̫̟̳͌̓͗͊̐̈̄́̏̀͂̎̃̈́̈́̎͋̀̒̊̀̈́͒̽͘̕͝Ȏ̡̡̨̡̝̬̠͚̠̯͖̹̟͓̮̻̲͙̖̪̯͇̍̅̂̌̌̒͗̈́̉͆̇̑͒̉̂̾̃̌̽͛͘͝͝ͅM̡̢̢̘͉̤͍̫̺̻͕̱̤̤̞̟̞̹͉͓̥̳͖̹̤̆̋̓͂̂͑̃̌͛͂̋̂̓̏́̀̾̋̈́̅̐̅̎̇̐̽͜͝Ȩ̨̛̭̥̹̳̫͎͖͈̳̠͍͙͉̻̼͍̞̜̺̝̻̝̗̳̏̈̓͋̐́̋͆͋̓̿͐͆̾̾̃͌͌̾̊́̚͘͘͜S̡̢̡̡̛̯̪̬̹̲̙̮̲̲̤͖͖̞̲̞̼̪͓͇̤̼͇͆͋̊̈̑̆̿̐̎͑̾̅̀̒̓̎̐̍̽̈́̋̽̓̔̍͜͝





</zalgo>

As a new twist on the age-old Zalgo generation problem, your goal is to take a string and "compress" it into a single Zalgo character. You will write two programs, one which takes in a string of printable ASCII and outputs a single Zalgo character, and a second which takes in a single Zalgo character and outputs the original ASCII string.

Answer 17

Sorting trains

This problem is based off of a solitaire card game called Calculation. You can play it here (highly recommended).

You are in charge of designing a train yard. At your junction, you have an In/Out track (queues) and Storage (stack). Train cars come in a random order; your job is to arrange them into 4 different ordered trains. Land is expensive, so we need you to minimize the amount of storage tracks we need.

Your rail car mover can only handle 1 train at a time, and move a car:

1. In track -> Out track
2. In track -> Storage track
3. Storage track -> Out track.

Each Out Track needs the same 25 cars, each in a different order:

Track 1: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,0
Track 2: 2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22,24,1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,21,23,0
Track 3: 3,6,9,12,15,18,21,24,2,5,8,11,14,17,20,23,1,4,7,10,13,16,19,22,0
Track 4: 4,8,12,16,20,24,3,7,11,15,19,23,2,6,10,14,18,22,1,5,9,13,17,21,0

We can use (nx+n) mod 25 to calculate ID of the xth car of the nth track.

Important notes:

• Storage tracks can store as many cars as you want, but you can only remove the most recently placed car
• Cars cannot be moved from one storage track to another
• Your algorithm must be deterministic (it must do the same thing given the same input queue and the same number of storage stacks)
• You may get into an impossible situation, where you end up not being able to order the trains. If that happens, try again with additional storage tracks.

Input:

Your input is a list of integers, where each integer is the ID of the train car.

Output:

You need to return a list of moves that sorts the cars into the Out tracks. A move looks like I->S1 or S1->O2, where I is the input track, S# is a storage track, and O# is an output track.

Scoring:

Your score is the total number of tracks you need for of all test cases (you can use a different number of tracks for each test case). Lowest score wins.

Test cases:

4,13,20,23,22,21,0,18,8,17,16,6,18,22,15,19,21,8,6,24,7,21,9,4,24,19,0,20,12,1,3,10,5,6,19,23,17,9,14,24,13,5,10,15,2,14,7,8,6,10,3,18,22,16,2,4,10,14,1,21,11,9,22,18,20,16,1,4,12,0,12,11,20,11,19,12,0,13,9,11,23,24,15,3,14,5,2,5,8,7,7,3,16,13,15,23,17,1,2,17
1,8,7,5,6,7,21,9,15,5,7,6,21,13,13,18,16,12,22,10,18,14,13,14,10,0,8,24,13,23,2,9,3,4,19,11,24,16,15,10,8,22,3,2,16,17,1,2,12,18,19,2,19,22,0,23,12,24,11,23,23,3,21,15,0,16,14,5,17,10,20,20,0,15,6,7,20,11,17,22,6,17,5,9,1,8,14,21,4,4,3,11,12,4,20,19,1,18,9,24
21,2,14,11,12,21,15,21,16,23,2,19,8,14,23,0,16,4,7,9,24,10,0,11,17,5,4,8,10,0,20,6,5,18,18,6,9,10,22,10,9,1,16,22,1,22,6,17,19,7,2,1,7,18,3,18,11,2,11,7,23,17,6,3,19,13,21,4,20,14,24,20,15,15,15,13,13,12,22,5,13,20,24,3,24,23,4,0,9,8,5,17,16,8,14,12,3,19,1,12
2,7,10,22,15,3,16,7,3,6,4,17,2,20,6,21,13,5,1,7,16,18,24,17,8,14,5,23,17,18,13,0,9,14,24,21,19,23,0,20,15,1,12,24,3,18,11,5,15,7,4,4,9,8,17,12,0,23,6,8,14,12,1,22,9,11,14,20,19,3,12,23,11,19,16,11,22,16,9,4,13,19,1,22,15,2,8,10,0,13,10,18,24,10,21,6,5,2,21,20
14,20,18,21,19,10,7,16,2,22,14,15,17,24,8,10,13,0,11,5,11,11,7,13,19,9,22,10,7,0,3,16,2,8,21,8,4,14,2,19,24,16,12,1,0,0,17,15,1,21,6,5,4,6,12,23,3,15,21,2,12,23,14,23,5,1,10,1,17,13,7,22,4,5,18,6,18,12,16,11,9,13,6,19,23,15,17,22,4,20,8,3,18,20,24,20,9,24,3,9
0,23,4,4,14,17,14,0,8,21,8,9,8,5,16,20,15,9,24,23,12,11,24,2,14,17,3,21,1,19,5,17,15,16,7,2,22,20,6,1,24,16,7,22,21,19,6,13,23,11,4,11,15,19,20,19,18,5,1,18,10,22,16,6,18,20,10,9,6,2,12,23,7,12,3,9,10,7,5,10,13,3,17,12,13,2,1,0,15,4,22,18,11,14,3,24,21,8,0,13
8,19,19,0,23,7,10,21,2,22,13,20,2,10,16,21,3,17,20,18,5,9,14,19,22,0,7,6,3,10,18,6,6,5,24,2,11,24,7,1,11,17,8,9,24,5,15,18,16,24,11,5,14,1,0,13,16,0,13,17,8,12,4,1,21,20,11,10,14,16,8,21,4,7,17,9,13,4,1,3,15,6,22,23,9,23,15,12,15,19,3,20,2,23,12,12,4,18,22,14
17,3,8,24,18,5,7,2,13,2,9,19,21,6,8,8,21,16,17,3,11,20,24,24,12,11,18,11,16,15,24,9,14,10,18,4,22,20,0,10,7,14,6,1,15,6,13,7,3,12,7,23,4,21,0,23,2,10,12,22,9,17,0,4,4,3,22,16,23,20,15,18,10,8,23,1,14,11,5,19,16,1,2,22,9,12,1,5,13,19,14,20,19,5,13,0,15,6,21,17

Answer 18

Let's play Ticket to Ride!

(Note, this challenge was inspired by the board game Ticket to Ride, but is massively simplified to a graph-searching problem).

For this challenge, you have a list of cities (nodes), connections (edges), and tickets ([City, City, Point] tuple). You also have a limited number of trains, where each connection takes exactly 1 train to fill. For each ticket you complete (there is a filled-in path between the two cities), you get the ticket's point value.

Your goal is to maximize the number of points you get. For example, given the following graph:

A-B-C-D

and two tickets [(A,B)=>1, (B,D)=>2], and 2 trains, then you should output (B,C), (C,D) as that gives you a total of 2 points, because you have created a path from B to D, which matches the second ticket.

Everybody will be working on the same large graph and set of tickets, so your score is the score of your solution. Your solution is a list of filled connections (not the code that generated them, although your code should be included).

Answer 19

Risk dice battle

Risk is a board game in which you attempt to conquer the world by attacking your opponents' countries. As the game progresses the number of armies involved in attack gets higher and higher, which can lead to a lot of dice rolling. I want you to make this easier for me. It's possible that my favourite answer will actually get used when playing Risk.

Rules of Risk battles

Each country in Risk must have at least one army on it. Therefore a battle can only take place if the attacker has more than one army (in case he loses.) The defender obviously has at least one army.

The attacker rolls 3 dice (only 2 if he has only 2 armies) while the defender rolls 2 dice (only 1 if he has only 1 army.) Once the dice are rolled, the highest dice of each player are compared, then the next highest. (If one player rolled more dice than the other, his lowest dice are discarded.)

For each dice comparison, the player with the lower score loses an army. If the dice are the same, the defender wins and the attacker loses an army. Note that this does not necessarily put the attacker at the disadvantage, as he frequently has more dice to roll than the defender.

Example:

               Attacker 6 3 2
               Defender 5 4
                        ^ ^
                        | |
 Defender loses 1 army -+ +-Attacker loses 1 army

For interest the probabilities are as follows:

                        Defender rolls 2 dice       Defender rolls 1 die
                        --------------------------------------------------- 
Attacker rolls 3 dice   Attacker loses 2 29.26%     Attacker loses 1 34.03%
                        Both lose 1      33.58%     Defender loses 1 65.97%
                        Defender loses 2 37.17%

Attacker rolls 2 dice   Attacker loses 2 44.83%     Attacker loses 1 42.13%
                        Both lose 1      32.41%     Defender loses 1 57.87%
                        Defender loses 2 22.76%

Task

A full program is required which will accept from stdin or commandline, a number of attacking armies and a number of defending armies. There will be at least 1 army of each. Your code will display the number of armies as follows

1.If there is only 1 attacking army, your program shall immediately terminate with the message Insufficient force.

2.The code shall now accept a user input from stdin. If the user now enters anything other than an empty string, the code shall terminate. If the user enters an empty string, you must simulate the roll of the appropriate number of dice, sort each player's dice in descending order, and report the result and the updated number of armies per example below. 2 trailing newlines are required after the output.

Attacker dice: 5 3 1
Defender dice: 5 4

Attacker: p armies (where p is the number of attacking armies)
Defender: q armies (where q is the number of defending armies)
(2 trailing newlines)

3.If either player now has 0 armies, display the message Defender defeated! or Attacker defeated! as appropriate and terminate the program. Similarly, if the attacker now has only 1 army, terminate with the message Insufficient force.

The program shall now loop back to step 2 and continue until either one player's armies are depleted or the user enters a non-empty string.

Rules

The distribution of the dice throws shall be exactly as with real dice (up to the limits of uniformity both the dice and the random number generator used.) It is expected that most submissions will generate the numbers for each die and then sort them. Clever submissions that generate the output in other ways avoiding the sorting step are acceptable, but the theoretical probability distribution of the output must be identical to the real dice throws. (For example it is permissible to precalculate and presort all 216 possible throws of 3 dice and select one of these at random.)

Due to the real time nature of the application a full program is required, with input from stdin (enabling the user to run quick fire battles by reviewing the output and pressing the return key.)

Formatting of output strings and newlines shall be exactly as described above. Up to 2 additional symbols (but not alphanumerics) are acceptable between and around numbers. For example [3,2,1] is an acceptable way of displaying the roll of 3 dice.

Scoring

This is code golf. Shortest code in bytes wins.

(example output to be added)

Answer 20

Help find Mersenne primes! code-golf restricted-source math sequence

There has recently been a discovery of a new prime number: 2^74207281-1. This is the biggest prime number to date and broke the previous 3-year record holder by over 4 million digits!

Your job will be to help mathematicians find some prime numbers (not really). You must take in an integer N and output the Nth Mersenne prime (OEIS A000668). You may assume that the Nth Mersenne prime is under your languages maximum integer number and/or will not cause an overflow (but your code should work for higher numbers if your language allowed it. You may not use any built ins for primality testing and cannot hard-code any values.

You can find a list of most of these numbers over here.

Test Cases

2 -> 7
5 -> 8191
8 -> 2147483647

This is code-golf, shotest code in bytes wins.

Answer 21

Parse an "Efficient" Encoding

Let us define a fictitious encoding "ENCWID", that follows this general form: there are three bits that denote the length of the following character, for each character. This looks something like this:

WWWN..N
   ^^^^--- the actual character
^^^------- width bits; from 000 to 111

Perhaps this is a little vague. To understand this better, let us encode the string "Hello!" into ENCWID. Observe:

H   72   1001000
e   101  1100101
l   108  1101100
o   111  1101111
!   33   100001

This diagrams the binary ASCII codes of each character in the string. Let us put these values into an array that represents "Hello!": [1001000,1100101,1100101,1100101,1101111,100001]. The widths for each of these strings are 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, and 6 respectively. To binary, this makes 7 111 and 6 110. Now, we put the binary length of each binary ASCII code before the actual ASCII code, and combine them all into a single string, as such:

111-1001000 111-1100101 111-1101100 111-1101100 111-1101111 110-100001
(7)-(  H  ) (7)-(  e  ) (7)-(  l  ) (7)-(  l  ) (7)-(  ᴏ  ) (6)-(  !  )

(Spaces, hyphens, and parentheses added for visual clarity.)

And thus, the encoding of "Hello!" is 11110010001111100101111110110011111011001111101111110100001.

Decoding the string form is perhaps rather easy, using the following steps:

1. Read three characters; call this N.
2. Set N to the decimal number represented by N, from binary.
3. Read the next N charcters; call this S.
4. Parse S as a binary number, and append this character to the result.
5. If there are still unread characters, go to step 1. Otherwise, continue.
6. Return the result.

Objective Your objective is to write two programs; one that encodes and one the decodes the described encoding. Your score is the sum of the program's byte count.

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Implications

Suppose that we can actually implement this in mainstream use; then, an encoding can be used that utilizes the lower-width codepoints for the most common letters in a given language. This would allow for a lesser amount of bits to convey the same message.

Say we did this for English, and that this

earniol1t.9h0s,dC()u2Scmy8gBJDW7HvM6RbkA435wfLPGpTKEFNYO
zI'Vq/Ux-[]jZ"  ;:QX&!

is the approximate frequency at which english letters occur, this could be our (partial) encoding:

   0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  A  B  C  D  E  F
0     e  a  r  n  i  o  l  1  t  .  9  h  0  s  ,
1  d  C  (  )  u  2  S  c  m  y  8  g  B  J  D  W
2  7  H  v  M  6  R  b  k  A  4  3  5  w  f  L  P
3  G  p  T  K  E  F  N  Y  O  \n z  I  '  V  q  /
4  U  x  -  [  ]  j  Z  "  \t ;  :  Q  X  &  !  \

Thus, "Hello!" would be encoded as:

H   12   18   10010     (5 => 101)
e   01   01   1         (1 => 001)
l   07   07   111       (3 => 011)
o   06   06   110       (3 => 011)
!   4E   78   1001110   (7 => 111)

101-10010 001-1  011-111 011-111 011-110 111-1001110
(5)-( H ) (1)(e) (3)-(l) (3)-(l) (3)-(o) (7)-(  !  )

=> 1011001000110111110111110111101111001110
(²7ß{Î, under ISO-8859-7 encoding)

And, "Hello!" fits into a clean 5 bytes under this encoding, as opposed to 6-byte standard encoding. This would equate to a lot more bytes saved for a higher sample size.

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Meta

Suggestions?

Answer 22

Language Guessing

code-challenge parsing

(Inspired by What's the Language?)

According to the first Google result, the most popular programming languages are:

1. Java
2. C++
3. C#
4. Python
5. PHP

(For our purposes, C and C++ will both be treated as C++, though the test cases may include C source code and header files)

Your Task

Write a function that accepts a String, determines what programming language the String is, and returns its result.

Rules

• The input String will be in one of the five languages listed above.
• Your method should return a String with the name of the programming language exactly as written above.
• Your code must be under 150 bytes.
• No compiling, running, or otherwise evaluating the test cases to determine their language.
• No standard loopholes.

Scoring

• The code with the highest match percentage wins
• For every 15 bytes under the 150 byte limit, you get an extra percentage point (a 61-75 byte program would get 5% extra on top of the match percentage.
• The method or function header does not count toward the total byte count. Return statements do count, however.
• The code used to load the test cases and feed them into your method does not count either.
• You get one import for "free". Any other imports count toward the byte limit.

Test Cases and Testing Code

Here is sample java code used for testing submissions. If you write in a language besides java, your tester must only accept one parameter, and cannot access any variables that are stored between iterations of the function. The entire code, including the tester, must be included in your answer.

import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;

public class Tester{

    static int right = 0;//How many are right
    static int total = 0;//How many tested in all

    public static void main(String[] args){

        //Opens up test cases
        File rootFolder = new File("./Test Cases");
        File[] subFolders = rootFolder.listFiles();

        HashMap<File, String> fileList = new HashMap<>();

        //Add all files in a subfolder to a HashMap and associate them with the language
        for(File currentFolder : subFolders){
            if(currentFolder.isDirectory()){
                for(File currentFile : currentFolder.listFiles()){
                    fileList.put(currentFile, currentFolder.getName());
                }
            }
        }

        //Iterate through files
        fileList.forEach((File f,String lang)->{
            System.out.print("Testing " + f.getName()+"\t");

            try{
                //Get contents of file
                BufferedInputStream input = new BufferedInputStream( new FileInputStream(f));
                Scanner sc = new Scanner(input);
                sc.useDelimiter("\\Z");
                String contents = sc.next();

                //Call compute method and store result
                String result = compute(contents);

                //Increment counters
                if(result.equals(lang))
                    right++;
                total++;

                System.out.println("Guess: " + result +"\tActual: " + lang);
            } catch(IOException e){
                System.out.println("There was an error when reading the file");
            }
        });

        //Print out final results
        System.out.println("Right: " + right);
        System.out.println("Total: " + total);
        System.out.println("Percent: " + (double)right * 100.0 / total + "%");
    }

    public static String compute(String c){
        //YOUR CODE HERE
    }
}

The test cases consist of 500 code samples (100 from each language) from around the internet (mostly github). Specific locations can be found in Credit.txt in the Test Cases folder.

The test cases can be downloaded here.

Answer 23

Semaphore Decoder

You are to write a program which can decode ASCII semaphores. Each semaphore fits in a 3x2 grid, with the flagger's head represented by a o (which is always in the upper middle square), and his flags represented by _ | / \. Each block is separated by one blank column. Text may continue onto additional lines if it gets too long. The letters look like the following format:

[Space]  o   A  o  B _o  C \o  D |o  E o/  F o_  G o   H _o  I \o  J |o_
        | |    /|     |     |     |    |     |     |\    /      /       

K  o|  L  o/  M  o_  N  o   O _o\  P _o|  Q _o/  R _o_  S _o   T \o|
  /      /      /      / \                                  \

U \o/   V |o   W /o_  X o/  Y \o_  Z o_
            \           \             \

To keep your messages from being observed by spies, your code must be as short as possible.

Example:

Input

_o| _o_ _o\  o   o   o_  o_ \o   o   o   o  _o| \o/  o_  o_  o/  o/ _o   o
             |\ /|  /   /    /  / \  |\ | |           \   \ /    |    \ | |
 o   o  |o   o  \o  _o\ |o   o/  o   o   o/ _o\  o/  o_
/|  / \  |  | |  |       |   |  | |  |\ /       /    |

Output

PROGRAMMING PUZZLES AND CODE GOLF

Answer 24

Pixel "Density"

In this challenge, we will be viewing each pixel in an image as a particle with two properties:

(1) vertical density (vd)

(2) horizontal density (hd)

These two properties are determined by the RGB values of the pixel in the following manner:

vd = Red - Blue

hd = 128 - Green

We call a sorted image an image that satisfies the following conditions:

For each pixel:

1. no pixel to the right has a lower hd

2. no pixel to the left has a higher hd

3. no pixel above has a higher vd

4. no pixel below has a lower hd

The challenge is to produce such sorted images.

Input

An image in any "common, recognizable" format, via file or stdin.

Output

A sorted image in a "common, recognizable" format (not necessarily the same format as input) containing exactly the pixels of the original , via file or stdout.

Relevant Details:

• This is code-golf.

• alpha values (if they exist) are ignored.

• Libraries may be used, but size must be added to your score

• "common, recognizable" formats will be determined by the community. I don't expect this to be an issue, but if you feel the the loose wording is being exploited, downvote the answer (or even better, help me fix it before the challenge goes live. I don't really want to enumerate the allowed formats, but maybe that is a better option?).

If there is interest in the question, I will create a reference implementation as well as test cases.

Answer 25

Windows batch polyglot/hybrids challenge with any language possible /* I need some help to refine my challenge */

As the batch scripts are pretty limited, hybrid files that embed a code from another language into a batch file are used a lot lately.

Though usually there are some requirements for a good hybrid script:

1. The embedded code should be usable as-it-is - without any ugly batch escaping sequences.
2. There should not be redundant output. E.g. a lot of languages use /* */ for multi-line comments. If the batch script executes a line that starts with / * it will print an error message an will continue to the next line .Though it will allow you to hybridize C/C++/C#/Java/... with a batch file the error message cannot be surpassed so this will not count as a good hybrid.
3. No temp files.It's easy to output a lot of code into a temp file that will be later executed , the IO operations will slow the script and on of the main advantages of batch scripting (the speed) will be lost. And more over is a challenging constraint. But this will be not possible for compiling languages and for extension sensitive languages.

Some examples will follow:

JScript (good for example as it comes with every windows installation) technique invented somewhere in the link by Tom Lavedas :

@if (true == false) @end /*
@echo off
cscript //nologo //e:javascript "%~dpnx0" %*
echo Output from the batch.
goto :EOF */

WScript.Echo('Output from the jscript.');

The output will be:

Output from the jscript.

Output from the batch.

The technique uses the JScript (javascript has no such thing) specific @ directives to make the code valid (or silent) both for both languages.

Another example (again with JScript) invented by Ryan Biesemeyer:

0</* :
@echo off
echo Output from the batch.
cscript /nologo /E:jscript %~f0 %*
exit /b %errorlevel%
*/0;

WScript.Echo('Output from the jscript.');

This time is used the redirection priority in batch scripts and 0</* : will be parsed as 0:</* .

Here are some info that can help you:

• every line that starts with @ will be silent - even the invalid commands.
• every line that starts with : will be taken as label in batch and will be not executed
• every line that starts with something like <someWord : someWord will be silent because of redirection priority
• every line that starts with something like digit<someWord : someWord will be silent because of redirection priority (this time the output will be redirected to a stream).In this case will be best to use 0
• you can use <space><tab> ; , = at the beginning of every line - these will be ignored as standard delimiters in batch.Can be useful if some language use some of these as comment.
• if you start a line with %not_existing_variable% it will be replaced with nothing.Could be useful if in some language comments start with percent.
• If you finish a line with a caret ^ the next line will be appended at the end.With the caret in batch you can escape the new line.

here's a little bit more inspiration

And here's the challenge. Your script should be with .bat or .cmd extension . It should contain a code from another language - the code should be used by the second language as it is (no escapes symbols) .REPL tools are accepted with the condition of no escape symbols - except in the line where the REPL tool is invoked. There should not be redundant output. There should be not temp files (with the exception of compiling languages , and file extension sensitive languages - then the file should copy itself in the %TEMP% folder).

Each script should accept one command line argument which will be printed 5 (five) times . Both from the batch part of the code and from the second language prefixed by the language name (for the batch case it should be BATCH: for example.If the second language is Ruby it should be RUBY:)

For sure this will be not possible with every language , but for many it is achievable.

The winner should propose the most solutions with different languages (or if the language is the same a different kind of techniques should be used like in the two examples above).In case of equal number of solutions the first one wins.

Answer 26

Weekly Physics Golf #{TBD}: Wavelength of a Sound Wave code-golfmath

META NOTE: I believe, and others in the comments, that this challenge is quite trivial. So, I will be working on making this challenge harder in the next few days.

Introduction to the Series

Every week I will be posting a physics challenge. My goal here is to design challenges that in the end, teach some people some physics. Overall, the challenges will be very basic with little information. All of these challenges will have the minimal information necessary to solve them, and the goal is for users like you to do some research, watch some videos, and understand how these concepts work to teach you how to approach these types of physics problems and explain how they work. Of course, I will also give two optional hints per challenge, which are there if you do not have the time or determination to do the research, or you cannot figure out how to do the problem after researching. The two hints will be "necessary equations for this challenge" and "process to solve the problem". The hints are completely optional to use and it is encourages to not use them, but as stated above to learn the information for yourself. The series will have one main leaderboard. Whoever has the least combined byte count for all of the challenges gets a to be determined prize. Each challenge will range in difficulty, with an upwards trend of difficulty. I wish you all luck and I hope you learn a thing or two!

Challenge #{TBD}: Wavelength of a Sound Wave (Difficulty: EASY)

Many people may not know that sound is actually a wave, which would explain why it can go through objects and bend around corners. But it has some really interesting properties. For example, the speed of the sound wave changes from a few factors, all relating to the medium it travels through. In this challenge, you will have to figure out the wavelength of a sound wave through a given medium.

But first, lets define a medium. A medium is any liquid, solid, or gas that a wave can travel through. Mediums can affect the speed of a sound wave in two ways: the density of the medium, and the bulk modulus elasticity of the medium. But what are these two things? Well lets first consider the density of an object. Density is defined to be the mass divided volume of the object, or in simple terms, amount of mass in a given space. This is important, as waves travel differently through mediums of different densities. The reason behind this is that a medium with a higher density has more inertia (the resistance to change in motion). An object with a higher inertia will be more difficult to move with a wave (which displaces particles to move). Therefore, INCREASED DENSITY corresponds to DECREASED WAVE SPEED.

Now lets define bulk modulus elasticity. This is really just a fancy name for stiffness of an object. But what does this have to do with anything? Well, when an object is stiffer, each molecule is more interconnected to other molecules. And because a wave displaces particles to "move", it will move through a stiff medium faster because it can move larger molecules, hence moving more distance in a shorter time, a.k.a. moving faster. Therefore, INCREASED BULK MODULUS ELASTICITY corresponds to INCREASED WAVE SPEED.

So in this challenge, I will give you the density and the BME (bulk modulus elasticity) of the medium, and also the frequency of the sound wave. Your job is to use this information and output the wavelength. Here are the full specs:

• Input will be three numbers (not necessarily integers). They correspond to density in kg/m^3, bulk modulus elasticity in Pascals, and sound wave frequency in hertz.
• Input can be in any order, in any convenient format (so 12.3 45.6 78.9, [12.3 45.6 78.9], and 78.9,[12.3,45.6] are all acceptable).
• You may assume that input will never cause any sort of error during execution.
• Output will be the calculated frequency of the sound wave in meters, precise to three decimal places, omitting leading and trailing zeros. For example, inputs of 6, 27, and 3 would given an output of 0.707 after rounding from 0.70710678118654752440084436210485.
• Shortest code in bytes wins!

Test cases

META NOTE: Test cases to come, I am working on them right now.

Hints

These hints are for those who do not want to put in the time and effort of research, or those who could not find a solution. So, here are the two hints:

Hint 1: Equations

You need the following equations for this challenge:

Hint 2: Sample Solution Process:

Using the two equations above, we can set them equal to each other to get:

Solving for wavelength gets us this equation:

From here you can just plug in values.

This is code-golf, so shortest code in bytes wins. Good luck!

Leaderboard

Meta note: blah blah blah, working leaderboard will eventually go here! This leaderboard will contain and combine scores for all of the weekly challenges. It will only be visible on this question, though.

Answer 27

_{I've posted two well-received (by my standards: 10+ no downvotes) questions in the past; however, I've always missed a bit of information, so I welcome all feedback to this challenge!}

Introduction

A palindrome is a word or string of words that is the same forwards as it is backwards, e.g. taco cat, kayak, madam im adam. I'm sure by now you're all familiar with palindrome.

An anagram is a word or group of words that when the letters are rearranged, forms a different word or string of words. If you haven't already, Google for anagram or define anagram (not part of the puzzle, obviously).

Task

Your task is to write a program which will take a string of lowercase characters and blank space, and return truthy/falsey if the string can be anagrammed into (or is) a palindrome (even if it doesn't form a legit word). This is code-golf so shortest answer wins. Standard loopholes apply.

Input

• A string of at least 1 character containing a mixture of lowercase alphanumeric characters and blank space
• Whitespace can be ignored when determining whether a word or phrase can be anagrammed.

Output

• Truthy/falsey

Examples:

Truthy
kayak = kayak / akyka
maam = maam / amma
her taco cat hero = hertacoocatreh
boob = obbo
boobs = bosob
ooh = oho
lol = lol (already a palindrome)
zzz = zzz (already a palindrome)
i = i
00010001 = 10000001
0xd00000d = 0d00x00d0
sevens 7even = seven7neves
Falsey
glum glow worm
maam im adam
book
banana
nana ant
jquery

Answer 28

Maximum cover time ratio

Given an undirected graph and a start node, there is an expected number of steps to reach all possible nodes if you walk at random. This expected number of steps will depend on which node you start from. For a given graph and starting node, let us call the number of steps to visit all nodes in the graph the cover time. We can estimate the cover time by just setting off 1000 walks and taking the average.

You can also set off two independent random walks from the same node at once and see how many steps it takes for every node to be visited by at least one of the walks. Clearly you can do this with more than two as well. Let us call the expected number of steps to reach each node with at least one of k random walks starting from the same node, the k-cover time. We can see that cover time = 1-cover time.

Task

Write code that explores different undirected graphs, starting nodes and values of k and computes both the cover time and the k-cover time for each. You should use at least 1000 random walks to estimate the time to reach all nodes. The goal is to maximize the expected cover time ratio explained below.

Output

Your code should output a single graph in any sensible format you choose, the value k, the identity of a starting node, the cover time and the k-cover time.

Score

Your score will be cover time from your given starting node divided by k times k-cover time starting from the same node.

Languages and libraries

You can use any language or library you like (that wasn't designed for this challenge). However, for the purposes of scoring I will run your code on my machine so please provide clear instructions for how to run it on Ubuntu.

My Machine The timings will be run on my machine. This is a standard Ubuntu install on an 8GB AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core Processor. This also means I need to be able to run your code.

Details

• I will kill your code after 2 minutes unless it starts to run out of memory before then. Your code should therefore output something before 2 minutes is up.

---

Any help with finishing this question would be gratefully received. I think it just needs examples and test cases and maybe a picture or two.

code-challenge

Answer 29

Show me your OOP

popularity-contests

Your task is to implement OOP that have this feature:

1. Inheritance (Single dispatch)
2. Class

Your submission have to translate this pseudo-code into your languages:

class Animal{
    Animal(string name){
        printLn("An animal has summoned " + name);
    }
    public void sound();
}
class Sheep extends Animal{
    bool woolstate;
    Sheep(bool state){
        woolstate = state;
    }
    public void sound(){
        printLn("Mbaaaa\n");
    }
    public void growWool(){
        woolstate = true;
    }
    public void getWool(){
        if(woolstate == true){
            printLn("Mbaaaa\nget " + (new Math.Random()).getInt(0, 10).toString() + " bags of wool");
            woolstate = false;
        }
    }
}
class Worm(){
    Worm tails;
    public int numbers;
    public Worm(int number, int length){
        if(length != 0){
            tails = new Worm(number, length-1);
        }
        numbers = number;
        if(number == length){
            this.privateMethod
        }
    }
    public Worm getTails(){
        return this.tails;
    }
    public Worm setTails(Worm tail){
        this.tails = tail
    }
    public Worm getNumbers(){
        return this.numbers;
    }
    public Worm setNumbers(int number){
        this.numbers = number
    }
    public void sound(){
        printLn("Doesn't sound");
    }
    private void privateMethod(){
        printLn("This is a private method");
    }
}
int main(){
    Sheep a = new Sheep(true);
    Animal b = new Sheep(false);
    Worm c = new Worm(5, 5);
    b.sound();
    a.sound();
    b.getWool(); //Error
    a.getWool();
    if(c.getNumbers()==5){
        c.setNumbers(6);
    }
    b=c.getTails();
    b.setNumber(7); //Error
    b.sound();
}

If the random function is not available, you can deterministically return anything from 0 into 10.

The submission should be scored based on:

1. Difficulty of implementation (i.e. how far is the language from OOP?)
2. Ease of usage of implemetation
3. Efficiency of implementation
4. The pleasantness of syntax

Answer 30

Prove that this program terminates or run forever

cops-and-robbers

Introduction:

Halting problem has been shown to have no complete algorithm. Yet it is important to understand what the program does and verifying the program if the program matches with its specification

Challenger

Challenges

Your challenge is to write program that takes no input in given language (so no obscure language is used) and a formal proof that the program is halting or run forever. Output will be ignored.

Rules

1. Proof must be written formally.
2. No computer aided proof. (i.e. running the program, or convert it into Coq, Idris, or another dependent-typed language)
3. This is not underhanded challenge, so do not obscure the program.
4. If your program is not cracked after 6 days, then you must give the proof whether your program halts or not. It is then verified.
5. Your program should not depend on unsolved problems.
6. Cracking your own submission is not allowed.
7. Score for submission:
   • Cracked : -5
   • Verified : 10
   • Flawed : -15

Prover

Challenges

Your challenge is to proof that the program that is posted in Challenger thread is halting or run forever.

Rules

1. Proof must be written formally.
2. No computer aided proof. (i.e. running the program, or convert it into Coq, Idris, or another dependent-typed language)
3. Score for submission:
   • Verified (With no proof from owner) : 8
   • Verified (With flawed proof from owner) : 12
   • Flawed : -8

Sandbox Question

What language should I use? The requirement is:

1. Turing Complete
2. Imperative
3. Easy to understand, even to noncoder
4. Easy to write

Also, I need help with the leaderboard