What is the Sandbox?

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

See the Sandbox FAQ for more information on how to use the Sandbox.

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To add an inline tag to a proposal use shortcut link syntax with a prefix: [tag:king-of-the-hill]

Calculate an arbitrary linear recursive sequence

in this question given a recursive definition for a sequence we need to output a formula for the given sequence.

in this question, a linear recursive sequence is a sequence of the form:

a_0 = c_0
a_1 = c_1
...
a_{m-1} = c_{m-1}

for n >= m: a_n = x_1*a_{n-1} + x_2*a_{n-2} + ... + x_m*a_{n-m}


where m, c_1 ... c_{m-1}, x_1 ... x_m are all constants.

for example, such a definition (the fibonacci numbers):

a_0 = 0 // c_0 is 0
a_1 = 1 // c_1 is 1
for n >= 2: a_n = 1*a_{n-1} + 1*a_{n-2} // x_1 is 1 and x_2 is 1


the answer may be a function and get input as two lists, one containing a_0...a_{m-1} and one containing x_1 ... x_m, and return a string, or be a complete program and get the input as a space separated numbers.

because polynomials of degree up to 5 can be solved but polynomials of degree 5 or higher can't, the solution may assume that m is smaller than 5.

the output must be a formula that given n returns a_n. if two formulas are different but both return the same output for every index, both of them can be outputted. so, for the powers of 2, both (1+1)^n and 2*2^n - 2^n can be outputted.
in the output √5 denotes the square root of 5, as does 2√5. 3√5 denotes the third root of 5.

Example input and output:

f ([0,1],[1,1]) (fibonacci numbers) can result in ((1+√5)^n-(1-√5)^n)/√5
f ([1],[2])     (the powers of 2)   can result in 2^n
f ([1,2],[1,2]) (the powers of 2 again)


bonus:
if your solution uses no library function which solves equations, -80 bytes.

this is code golf, so smallest byte count wins

• This seems to hinge largely on solving the polynomial equation for the characteristic roots. For the Fibonacci one, would outputting floats in place of 1+√5 and 1-√5 be valid? – xnor Sep 25 '14 at 17:59
• @xnor what should I do? I guess allowing floats leads to an easier question, but outputting the exact formula is more mathematical. – proud haskeller Sep 25 '14 at 18:21
• @xnor I think floats won't be allowed – proud haskeller Sep 25 '14 at 18:22
• How then would one represent the roots of a fifth-degree polynomial? They're not generically algebraic. Maybe you can restrict to two-term recurrences to get quadratics. It would certainly make solving them and fitting to initial conditions easier, though perhaps that's less interesting. – xnor Sep 25 '14 at 18:39
• Could you please add some {} to your first code block and be consistent with the use of _ to indicate subscripts? At present, it seems to be more work than it should be to figure out how to read the equations. – Peter Taylor Sep 25 '14 at 22:37
• While it's true that cubics and quartics can be solved in radicals, the solutions are pretty ugly. I strongly advise you to write a reference solution so that you understand what you're asking for before you post the question. – Peter Taylor Sep 26 '14 at 10:42
• @PeterTaylor I was searching for the formulas and found this math.vanderbilt.edu/~schectex/courses/cubic . it is possible, but i guess the best solutions would just copy-paste the variables into the formulas, which isn't very interesting – proud haskeller Sep 26 '14 at 11:45
• @PeterTaylor Maybe restricting to qubic equations and requiring floats instead of √ would be more interesting because the solution will have to actually compute the solutions – proud haskeller Sep 26 '14 at 11:51
• @proudhaskeller I think that allowing floats is cleaner, but there's subtleties there too. Solution might use iterative rather than exact methods to find roots, so you'd need to specify a tolerance and bounds on the coefficients of your recursion. Also, the formula is different when you have a double-root, which solutions might fail to detect due to float precision issues. – xnor Sep 26 '14 at 21:01
• @xnor how is the formula different? I didn't get that – proud haskeller Sep 26 '14 at 21:04
• math.stackexchange.com/questions/129849/… – xnor Sep 26 '14 at 21:10
• @xnor I totally forgot that – proud haskeller Sep 26 '14 at 21:13
• @xnor Maybe the input should be restricted to not include these cases – proud haskeller Sep 26 '14 at 21:14

Fake the forecast #2

Somewhat unfairly, your boss wasn't happy with your last attempt at forecast fakery.

She's giving you one last chance, with extra stipulations.

This time your task is to draw a map, as a grid of arrows, representing both wind speed and direction.

• A grid is 8 tiles by 8 tiles.

• A tile is an arrow representing a direction and a speed.

• There are 8 potential wind directions, represented by the direction of the arrow:

1. N
2. NE
3. E
4. SE
5. S
6. SW
7. W
8. NW
• There are 6 potential wind speeds, represented by the colour of the arrow (e.g. ):

6. F0F (>60 mph)

There are geographical restrictions:

• Each tile has a terrain type, land (L) or sea (S). These are:

S L L L L L S S
S S S L L L L S
S S S L L L L S
S S S S L L L L
S S L S S L L S
S S S S L S L L
S S S L L S S S
S S S S S S S S

• Wind speed on land may only be between 1 and 4

• Wind speed at sea may only be between 3 and 6

• If a feature (i.e. direction or speed) differs from one of its 4 adjoining tiles (or 3 for side tiles, 2 for corner tiles) it can only differ by one increment or decrement from that neighbour. e.g. a tile whose neighbour has wind speed 4 may have a wind speed of 3, 4 or 5 (assuming it accords with other neighbours).
• Directions can loop around, i.e. N -> NW and NW -> N. However, speeds cannot.

Because your boss is looking for believable maps, she has introduced four arbitrary restrictions:

• There is always at least 1 tile with wind speed 6
• There is always at least 1 tile with wind speed 1
• A wind speed of 6 is always northeasterly
• A wind speed of 1 is always southwesterly

Maps must be unique, don't generate the same map for different inputs.

• Input is a positive non-zero integer corresponding to the days between now and your forecast (e.g. 1 is tomorrow's forecast, 365 is a year's time).
• Output can be any format (e.g. image or text) but must take the form of a grid of arrows
• Output should be reproducible — the same input will always give the same output
• Each output must be unique from those generated using a lower input.

Because you really need to impress your boss this time, you should aim to give valid output for as many days in to the future as you can. Therefore, scoring is based on input limit:

• Your submission's input limit is regarded as 1 less than the lowest input that gives non-unique or otherwise invalid output.
• For instance, if valid and unique output is produced for an input of 1, 2 or 3 but not 4, your input limit is 3.

The winner is the submission with the highest input limit - i.e. the submission which continues to give valid and unique output up to the largest input.

There is a 768 byte limit on source code. If there is a draw the entry with the fewest bytes wins, so keep it short.

Here's an example of valid output (terrain shown for illustrative purposes only):

Some clarifications:

• There needn't be a relation between forecasts, consecutive or otherwise (except that they must be unique).
• Outside of a submission's 'input limit' there is no defined output.
• There are no graphical restrictions except those specified.
• You may supply the terrain definition grid as input - in which case it wont count towards your byte count
• No other input or fetching of external data is permitted
• The link to the previous question is purely in theme, no rules are carried across and previous solutions (clearly) wouldn't be valid here.
• You don't have to draw the terrain type or any other embelishments - you can if you want but it isn't a popularity contest

Sandbox Questions

• Would this question be marked as a duplicate?
• Is a 768 byte limit too restrictive? Too easy?
• Have I left any loopholes?
• 1. I think you need to come up with something more radical than your last question to stop it from being closed as a dup. 2. Why 768? It seems very specific.. – Beta Decay Sep 29 '14 at 15:49

Translator to Minimize the Number of Characters

With code golf you are attempting to minimize the number of characters or bytes. The languages are, however, all just ASCII characters. While I do not want to see this in other code golf challenges, can you use more exotic characters to do the job?

CJam, for example, only uses ASCII characters in its code but many other characters can be placed into the compiler as a strings. I wrote a simple translator to test this out which can be coverted to:

㉕ァײோ¸༘ݩײ౲ᖒⲫ㶚ቲ㑼ᇦ㰌⧑༘ઃ௉ⲫ௔ྭഞࠗ㒍⾺

While this is intentionally not an acceptable answer for various reasons, it shows the range of possible characters the interpreter can identify. Please note unusual things that happend as you attempt to highlight the text.

The Challenge

1. Choose an online interpreter such as Ideone, CJam, or Golfscript and a language which can be run on that interpreter. This is so I know I am using pretty much the same resources as you are when I run your answer.
2. Create a translator in your stated language which accepts an "original" input code from the same language. It then outputs a string which can be pasted in your answer or in a comment on this site.
3. Create a second translator into which the previous output string can easily be incorporated. When this combined string and translator are run, it will run the original input code.

• The original input code to score your answer will be the same for any answers of the same language.
• This code for scoring will be subject to change and the translator must work for any code of that language the interpreter accepts. (exceptions listed below).
• This code for scoring will only contain ASCII characters and I will attempt to take it from existing answers on this site. At request it can exclude line breaks or specific characters for an additional 5% to your score AT MY DISCRESION (for instance Java code needs to be able to have spaces in it, I can't avoid that).
• The input code for scoring will be roughly 500 characters long. However, you transltors need to work regardless of the length of the input code so you can't take advantage of the fact that the code is even/odd. It does not need to work for null input.
• Any errors or anything malicious will obviously be disqualified.
• The compressed code must be copy/pastable to codegolf SE.
• When running the code from its translated form, the code must be able to accept input. This input is not going to be part of the code to be translated.
• Any null case which does not compact the original code in any way is disqualified.

Scoring

• Minimum score wins (surprise surprise)
• Score is the number of characters you need to run the original code minus the number of characters in the original input code plus 500 (combined with any modifiers).
• The length of the original translator does not matter.
• 5% is added to your score for each character/symbol your language often makes use of but your translators cannot handle. I can disqualify for this if I believe that the missing character too severly cripples the programmer.
• 5% is removed from your score if your two translators are the same piece of code (aka the translation is reversible).
• 5% is removed from your score if all characters in the compressed output are visible (no invisible ASCII characters). White space (spaces, tabs, line breaks) are visible but ASCII character 19 (for instance) is not.
• 3% is removed from your score if all characters are visually distinguishible (no two characters look the same but are read differently by the interpreter). The more obvious this is the better.
• 10% if anyone provides an acceptable example input code where the score without modifiers would be longer than the original input code. This would mean the translator effectively did not compress the input code.
• What's the use of the +500? Everyone's getting it, so the differences don't change at all. – Soham Chowdhury Oct 4 '14 at 9:30
• What happens if you remove/add 5% to a negative or zero score? – kaine Oct 4 '14 at 10:07
• A negative number becomes smaller and zero . . . remains zero. OK, I see your point now. – Soham Chowdhury Oct 4 '14 at 10:20
• 1. A map that is equal to its inverse is called involutive, not reversible. 2. The "input code" should be the same for all submissions. It won't be fair otherwise. 3. The first, third and fifth bonus seem rather subjective. 4. I don't understand the penultimate bullet point. 5. Am I right to assume that number of characters you need to run the original code is the number of characters of the encoded string plus the decoder? – Dennis Oct 12 '14 at 17:13
• THANK YOU FOR THE INPUT. I will try and adress concerns. 1. Ill include involutive if I post is but the map doesnt need to be involutive if the encoder can tell if the input is encoded. That was my intention. 2) the code would need to be in the same language as the language it is programmed in. Wont work for submissions in different languages to have the same input code. 3) ill try to find a way to clarify them. Only the first has a subjective component and would be available to anyone who asks for the point fee. I dont mean look simular, I mean print exactly identical symbols. – kaine Oct 12 '14 at 17:27
• 4) I will try and rewrite it. I meant there is a penalty if the encoder does not shorten some valid code of the appropriate length. 5) yes... These are my initial reactions. I am more than willing to remove bonuses if they complicate things too much. I think i need to include examples. I mean them there to make it easier to promote more answers. I dont want invisible characters but I would rather have answers with them than no answer. Again, thank you for the input. I like the idea and want to see it flushed out better than I probably could. Is there a good way to fix #2? – kaine Oct 12 '14 at 17:33

Sudden Death Rummy

with following rules: A 50 game match is played and the winner gets an average score per game. This average score is then multiplied by the bytecount of the program. The winner is the program with the lowest product of average score and bytecount.

Rummy is a card game where the objective is to get rid of all cards in your hand by forming "melds". A meld is either a consecutive series of cards in the same suit, or 3/4 cards of different suits of the same value, which is, in ascending order A(ce), 2-10, V(alet), Q(ueen) or K(ing). A meld is always at least 3 cards, and 13 cards at the most.

In my regional variant of discard rule Rummy, there are 7 rounds. the first 6 rounds require you to put down N+2 cards in 1 or more melds, then discard 1 card, then finish your turn, before you can start using existing melds or put down new melds. in the 7th round, you NEED to be able to place down your entire hand and discard the one card in 1 turn, before your opponent can do this. You start with 10 cards, and every turn you cannot empty your entire hand, you draw another card and give the turn to the opponent. The actual system involves buying cards and bidding wars, but to simplify, it's just round robbing cards until one of them finishes.

Input: a number between 1 and 100 denoting how many games should be played.

your program needs to generate 2 random legitimate hands as the first task. The deck starts with 104 cards: 2 full decks, 4 suits per deck, 13 cards per suit. 10 cards per hand from the deck.

second task: one hand randomly starts. If the program cannot make a legitimate Sudden Death Rummy hand clear, it draws a random card and hands the turn to the other hand. If the program CAN make a legitimate hand clear, it displays 2 lines. The first line is a comma-separated list displaying the winning hand clear. The second line is the sum of the value of the cards of the other hand, with number cards being their respective value and A/V/Q/K being 10 points each. this task switches between players until one of them is the winner. If the game lasts long enough for the deck to be depleted, no victor is declared and both hands get scored according to the above rules.

3rd task: after a victor is chosen, the next game starts. task 1 and 2 are repeated until there have been as many games as the input indicates. At this point, the match ends. The victor is the side who has the lowest amount of points after the end of the last game.

[Sandbox Note: I need to: Figure out a scoring method that doesn't require multiplying or averaging average score and bytecount without encouraging high bytecounts or average scores; decide whether to include a runtime limit; Decide whether the program should also display the hand and drawn cards.]

Build a Version Control System [WIP] code-golf

Git, SVN, Mercurial and Bazaar are just too bloated for you. You want something simple. Something as short as possible.

Rules

• Your program will be invoked every time an operation needs to be made to the repository.
• Your program must take commands from command-line arguments.
• The implementation of how the program stores its own data does not matter. Input and output format do.
• Give your version control program a name and version numbering (so I can keep track of when you update it).

Repositories

A "repository" is a directory with files and directories in it, as well as (a) special file(s) that store settings and information for the repository. These special files may not be included in version control. All other files in that directory should be included in version control.

Features

• 'init' command - sets up a repository in the working directory
• [BONUS 20pts] If a repository already exists in the working directory, erase or reset it first
• 'destroy' command - removes all of your special version control files from the repository. If you are not in the root directory of a repository, keep moving up one level until you find VCS files. If you reach the top level of the filesystem without finding your VCS files, don't do anything.
• [BONUS 15pts] Exit with status 1 if no VCS files are found

Scoring

Your score is the length of your code in bytes, minus all bonuses. Lowest score wins.

• What should "every time you change the program" say? I'm not sure whether it should be s/change/run/ or s/program/repository/. – Peter Taylor Oct 5 '14 at 22:07
• Do you need to generate diffs and resolve conflicts? That's a whole challenge on its own. – xnor Oct 6 '14 at 6:56
• @PeterTaylor I mean that your entry into the competition needs to have version numbering - so I can see that you've edited your post and added features. Probably not too important – user16402 Oct 6 '14 at 9:41
• @xnor Currently what I have in mind is a mechanism for committing changes, viewing a log of changes (diffs) and reverting to a particular commit - probably not much more (or if there is more, make it a bonus). By 'resolve conflicts' you mean when users A and B clone the same version, then both submit commits? – user16402 Oct 6 '14 at 9:43
• Yes, usually in version control systems, when two users make parallel changes to the same file, it tries to merge the changes. If they are consistent or to different parts of the file, the changes are merged. If not, a "conflict" is presented with options on how to resolve the inconsistency. See diff3 and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(revision_control)#Three-way_merge. This is a tricky algorithmic problem on its own, so perhaps it should be outside of the scope of your challenge. – xnor Oct 6 '14 at 20:08
• @xnor You're right. I think I'll restrict this to a single-user system (i.e. no clone/pull/push). Should those features be available as bonuses though? Or a separate challenge? Maybe the bonus should just be "Implement a system for resolving conflicts, using an external, existing tool for conflict resolution" – user16402 Oct 6 '14 at 20:45
• @professorfish Sounds reasonable, though perhaps you should say exactly what features it needs and what types of tools are OK, lest golfers cut too many corners. For diffs, will changes the to system be provided like "XYZ" inserted after line 1? Or will it be just be given the new file and have to produce the diff from the old file? If the second, then algorithmic alignment is also a challenge. It needs a notion of quality to prevent cheap diffs that claim the user deleted the whole file and added a new one when actually a single line was changed. – xnor Oct 6 '14 at 21:33

Unbreakable Wall Maria

In order to protect the last bastion of human civilisation against giant Titans, a large wall has been constructed around the perimeter of the city. It has been decided that another large wall, within the perimeter of the first one, will be erected to ensure the protection of the city. You have been assigned to design the wall to make sure it is strong and sturdy.

A wall of height p and length q is built out of identical rectangular blocks of height m and length n. A wall is considered unsecure if there is a straight line that can divide the wall into two pieces without cutting through any of the individual blocks. To illustrate, consider a wall of height 5 and length 6, constructed of blocks of 1 height and 2 length placed in either orientation. This is the test case 5 6 1 2 (a 5x6 wall composed of 1x2 blocks). There are at least two different ways of building this wall:

Diagram 1: Ways of building a wall

The first wall is an insecure wall because there is a line that divides the wall into two pieces (into a 6x4 block and a 6x2 block). Because there is only one line that divides the wall, we can call this wall an insecure-1 wall. An insecure-1 wall is more secure than an insecure-2 wall, but not as secure as a secure wall.

The second wall is a secure wall because there is no line that can divide the wall into two pieces without going through any of the blocks. You could also think of it as insecure-0 if you wanted to.

A secure wall is essential to the integrity of the wall. If it is an insecure wall it will be easily breached by the Titans. Your task is to design the wall. To do this, you will write a program that takes in the height and length of the wall and the blocks as input, and output (a graphical representation / an ASCII art representation) of the most secure wall that can be created using the blocks given.

Input

Input consists of four space seperated integers p, q, m, and n, which represents the height of the wall, the length of the wall, the height of the blocks, and the length of the blocks.

Output

This is the part I'm not sure about. I've got two possibilities: either I can make the question graphical output (i.e. I would expect the program to output an actual image), or ASCII art.

Possibility 1:

Output a graphical image (not ASCII art) of the wall. The overall appearance of the wall (e.g. line thickness, colours used, size, etc.) is up to you, but the lines that form the individual blocks must be clearly visible, and differentiated from the rest of the wall. This means you can't pull something like "this draws a black wall with black lines", or "this draws an infinitesimally small scaled wall", etc.

Possibility 2:

Output text based art (not a graphical image) of the wall. It should be drawn using the box drawing characters. The wall must be drawn to scale, but apart from that, you have some freedom in what characters to use (so you can choose to use the double line ones if you wish), but they have to be part of the Box Drawing Unicode block. In addition, the wall must be visible, so you can't write a program that outputs nothing and say "this draws an infinitesimally small scaled wall", etc.

Question to reader: Which output format do you think would make a more interesting challenge?

• As is, this seems like a math problem rather than a coding challenge. There's probably a criterion one can derive without needing to test tilings in code. But I like the idea behind the challenge. May I suggest something like generating or testing for secure walls? – xnor Sep 25 '14 at 3:04
• ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​@xnor I found that there was indeed a closed form solution for any case of the problem. Generating wall positions sounds like a good idea. I'll rewrite. – absinthe Sep 25 '14 at 3:20

One digits or two digits

Here’s the rule:

They're 2 players. Each player has a pool of $99. The player that takes the first turn will choose to invest an amount of$ taken (deducted)from your own pool. Then other player will do the same.

Who invests more wins the round. Who wins the most round is the match winner.

Unless it’s not that simple.

They’re a few twist:

Your opponent know how many points you use, well almost.

After you invest, your opponent know if you invest one digit number or two digit number. They’re told instantly after you invest your points. Just one or two digits. Not precisely.

WARNING: Player who moves first still get notified about your opponent who moves second.

Your opponent know how many points you still have left in your pool, well almost.

They’re only told if you have either $0 to$19, $20 to$39, $40 to$59 points, $60 to$79 points or $80 to$99. They’re told instantly after you invest your money.

WARNING: Since the notification is instant, that means if I move second, I got to know your score level before I move. If I notice a level change when you move first, I will know the level change before I make my move second. So I can act according to it.

It’s best of 9, and those $99 must survive those 9 rounds. So you don't want to invest all$99 in round 1. Well, it doesn’t mean that you have to spread those $99 exactly in 9 rounds. You can use those$99 in any mean to get victory. If you have a sure-fire strategy that will give you a guaranteed win, but it needs you to use all your $99 in the first 5 round, by all mean, go. Just remember that invested point don’t return back to your point pool, win or lose. In first round, the player who moves first decided randomly. In following round, the player who wins previous round moves first. If tie, the player who moves first last round, moves first again SCORING METHOD Each bot will be run double robin. The winner of the match results 1 point. Tie 1/2 point. Lose 0 point. After the match up, bot with most points declared as champion COMMUNICATION PROTOCOL During your turn, I will run your program and gives you lines of query from STDIO Each line is a query of this following type: START Every input start with this. YOU xx This means that in that round, you played xx(exact number of dollar you invested) ENEMY x y This means enemy invest x digit int that round (x is 1 if enemy invested 1 digit, x is 2 if enemy invested 2 digit) and y is the money level after the player invests(y is 0 for$0 to $19, 2 for$20 to $39, 3 for$40 to $59, 4 for$60 to $79, 5 for$80 to $99) FINISH End of query. We expect you to give us output. Your output must be to stdout and a single positive integer (0 is allowed) EXAMPLE: The match is between DEO vs WORLD. It was decided that DEO moves first. ROUND 1 Deo will receive this query: START FINISH  Deo decides to invest$10. Now he only has $89. WORLD receive this query: START ENEMY 2 5 FINISH  What WORLD deduces is that DEO played from$10 ~ $19. WORLD knew that DEO played at least$10 because the query said that ENEMY 2.. and WORLD knew that DEO played at most $19, because if DEO played$20, the query will be ENEMY 2 4

WORLD decides to invest $20. In round one, DEO invests$19 while WORLD invests $20. Since WORLD invests more, WORLD receive 1 point. Enter to round 2: WORLD starts first, since winner starts first by the rule WORLD receive this query: START ENEMY 2 5 YOU 20 FINISH  WORLD decides to invest$0.

START
YOU 19
ENEMY 2 4
ENEMY 1 4
FINISH


DEO realizes that in round 1, enemy played at least $20, due to level change. And he noticed that in round 2, enemy played 1 digit number. DEO taught that WORLD decides to save his money and invest$0. DEO decides to invest $1 WORLD invests$0 while DEO invests $1. Since DEO invests more money then WORLD, DEO win 1 point. And so on • what happens if both players invest the same number of points? Also, it seems you could guarantee a tie as player 1 by investing 0 in the first round (guaranteed loss/tie the round), then investing 99 the second round (guaranteed win/tie the round). – stokastic Oct 24 '14 at 20:38 • @stokastic None wins the round. You do realize that you need that it's best of 9. So if I follow your strategy, I will get 1 point by round 2, however, my opponent easily wins the next 5 and end the game (since I already use all of my 99 ). – Realdeo Oct 25 '14 at 8:15 Traffic lights Easy challenge Write a program that that graphically shows traffic lights on a crossroads. It should output animation. There should be red, red+yellow, green, blinking green, yellow. Bonus - pedestrian traffic light. Complex challenge Write a program that manages traffic lights in a town. Input is a graph of roads, information about where people want to drive (i.e. in morning they mostly drive at work, in evening they return home) tied to the graph. The system models cars and reports you current positions and speeds of each car. Drivers' goals are to be inferred from statistics. Your goal is to provide the most optimal operation mode of each individual traffic light, avoiding accidents. Questions • Which tags to use? Should it be a ? • Which is more viable - the easy or the complicated challenge? Should I try to work the complicated one to be more CodeGolf-worthy? • I think both of these challenges are too vague for this site. In the first, you should provide precise requirements defining a 'traffic light.' For example, the cloud in this question is extremely well defined. Your second proposal could work as a code-challenge, again if you add much more precise requirements. – FryAmTheEggman Oct 28 '14 at 18:54 • I see you're from Belarus. You have blinking green traffic lights there? I've not seen them in any of the 5 countries I've lived in. Don't assume people will know the exact sequence you want to use. Also in the USA you can turn right on a red light, but in western europe I've never heard of this. I would go for the easy challenge first, but you need to specify it more. How should it be displayed (I'm assuming plan view, light drawn on the right hand side of the road as seen by the driver with red nearest the intersection?) Is there a specified timed sequence or does it depend on demand? – Level River St Nov 9 '14 at 13:35 My telephone is a computer! I finally took the plunge and purchased a push-button telephone. It seemed a waste to just bin the old telephone, so I got working with some surplus chips and boards and things, and a soldering iron, and made it into a computer! Now I need a program. DialCode(c) can do Prime Numbers! I think. So I need some help with an algorithm for Prime Numbers, with the following limitations: 10 variables, which can contain any number from zero upwards, limited only by 32,767; (Var0 - Var9) 10 labels; (Label0 - Label9) 10 Machine Instructions; EndBlock: Ends a block - if the block was actioned, implicity Continue Main is executed, otherwise continues with next instruction (EndBlock) Test > 0: Starts a block, can test multiple variables (If > 0 Var0 ...) Test = 0: Starts a block, can test multiple variables (If = 0 Var0 ...) Set variable to another variable (Var0 = Var1) Set variable to 1 (Var0 = 1) Set variable to 0 (Var0 = 0) Increment variable by 1 (Var0 +) Decrement variable by 1 (Var0 -) Unconditional branch to label (Br Label0) Continue MAIN (Continue MAIN) Output variable (Output Var0)  Instructions prior to the first Test are executed only once, at the start of the program. Continue MAIN can be within a block or a "special case" unconditional use which is the target for the completion of a non-nested block. The first Test defines MAIN. MAIN is executed an "installation setting" number of times. These are 10 for Testing, and 1,200 for Production. A Test can define an internal block if appearing before an EndBlock. The completion of an internal block does not cause automatic iteration (but an explicit Continue MAIN can be used for that). All variables are initially zero. Example program Var1 = 1 If > 0 Var1 Var3 Var2 + EndBlock If > 0 Var2 Var1 + Var3 + EndBlock Var2 + Continue MAIN Output Var1 Output Var2 Output Var3  MAIN is defined here by the first IF > 0. The first test is not true. The second test is not true. Var2 gets one added, and MAIN starts up again (the unconditional Continue MAIN). The first test is still not true. The second test is now true, and Var1 and Var3 get one added. Since the block was executed, there is an implicit Continue MAIN. From this point on, the first IF > 0 will always be true, its block will be executed, with another implicit Continue MAIN so the program will finish quickly. The above program demonstrates how to implement a "case-like" structure. Put another way: Var1 = 1 BlockControl repeat 10 times case Var1 > 0 And Var3 > 0 Var2 + break case Var2 > 0 Var1 + Var3 + break case other Var2 + EndBlockControl Output Var1 Output Var2 Output Var3  The output from the program will be 2, 9, 1. Algorithm can be demonstrated in any language, even pseudo-code (if guaranteed to work). Explanations will probably make your Answer more popular. It is not required to write an emulator of the CPU, only to limit your choice of instructions in your language to those logically equivalent to what is supported by the CPU. DialCode(c) itself is a subset of your language (subject to differences in syntax)! There is no input. Output can be whatever is convenient. Feel free to use any specialist libraries, as long as they follow the above limitations. The Winner must work to the limitations. The most popular working algorithm will be chosen. Where submissions are effectively the same algorithm, the one posted first, which I was able to understand, is the tie-breaker. Sandbox Questions I can't find a question here about generating Primes only using addition and subtraction. I know one way to do it, so all the guff above is to funnel thought towards a known solution. The solution I've seen uses 10 variables, 10 or fewer types of instructions, and Labels are fun, but not necessarily necessary. Not sure of a reasonable time-limit to impose before the Accept. When I came across an algorithm for this, I thought it was really cool. Very easy to implement without knowing how the algorithm actually works, difficult to come up with the algorithm. Great fun finding out how the algorithm works. I would like to see a wide range of answers in a lot of languages, so that even fairly inexperienced users can have a crack at implementing. That's not going to work with one question, because I don't think it is an easy type of algorithm to develop (without foreknowledge or practice). So I was thinking one question to get an algorithm, a second question for implementation. I was thinking of "fastest code" but that puts Assembler/compiled languages/others as the natural rankings for that. Prompted by a comment by @isaacg, I'm now thinking "total number of DialCode(C) instructions executed" may work for a follow-up implementation question. So, Question One - get a nice algorithm. Question Two, implement in as few DialCode(C) instructions as possible. Any implementation is going to be Ssssslllllooooooowwwwww, with a capital S. Fewest DialCode(C) instructions is fastest code, whatever language the DialCode(C) is written in. Reasonably level playing field. I'll have a go at the suggested shortening of the question :-) • I like the challenge, but three comments: 1. The post might be a bit long, try to shorten it up a bit. 2. Why is it a popularity contest? Why not have an objective victory condition, e.g. fewest instructions? 3. What does this have to do with a telephone? – isaacg Oct 24 '14 at 19:36 • @isaacg Thanks. In reverser order; the telephone solely as a massively humorous way to limit everything to 10; perhaps not everyone can come up with an/the algorithm, but pretty much anyone can implement the algorithm, I didn't want APL 3 and everyone goes home, I want algorithm, and if successful a follow-up for implementation; if I take the humour out, it should be much shorter... – Bill Woodger Oct 24 '14 at 21:22 • Okay, I think I get the humor, and that seems good. Perhaps you could have the tiebreaker between people with the same algorithm be fewer number of operations in your language used, not fewer characters. – isaacg Oct 24 '14 at 21:25 • @isaacg Thanks again. I'll update the Sandbox Questions bit to try to expand on my thoughts on the follow-up. – Bill Woodger Oct 24 '14 at 21:39 • Awesome, I'm looking forward to the question. – isaacg Oct 24 '14 at 21:43 • @isaacg Finally got some time cleared to update this and cover the release. Any further suggestions, more shortening or otherwise, welcome. – Bill Woodger Oct 30 '14 at 16:42 This is an idea for an incremental answer-dependent question. I'm interested in comments. I will keep it here for a while and probably reword it at some point. Print the name of the language of the previous answer The first answer to this question must print the name Code-Golf without using any letters in Code-Golf. Each answer that follows will have to print the name of the previous language, but without using any characters in the previous program (you can use letters in the language name, but not the code they posted). Each language can only be used once. The winner is whoever posts the most valid answers. If there is a tie, then the length of each program is added together, and the answerer with the smallest total length is the winner. The main problem I see with this is that multiple people would be racing towards the next answer. Allowing people to still post answers they worked on would cause clutter, and if people sign up to be the next answerer, we could be waiting forever for one to post. You could possibly have another question for answers that were too slow. I would also need a rule against posting extraneous characters in your program that makes it impossible for the next one. • Would repeating languages be allowed? Would there be an answer time limit for users? Is Unicode allowed? You could limit answers to 40 distinct chars instead of forbidding extraneous characters, which is very subjective. – Calvin's Hobbies Oct 30 '14 at 23:20 • @Calvin'sHobbies I like the 40 distinct character limit idea! Repeating languages is not allowed, and I don't know what would be a good time limit for users. I think allowing Unicoding makes sense, unless that could be abused badly or gets boring. Thanks for the feedback! Did 8 hours feel too long or too short or just right on your Hello World question? – hmatt1 Oct 30 '14 at 23:26 • I think it should be at least 2 hours. Though 8 or higher is better if you're scoring by number of answers, just so people only have to post a couple times a day to be a contender. One issue with this is that even with 40 unique chars it could continue on practically forever (as long as people find new languages), so I'd suggest more restrictions. Maybe something like the first language has to start with "A" the second with "B", the 26th with "Z" the 27th with "A" again.... – Calvin's Hobbies Oct 30 '14 at 23:38 Elevator Controller Sandbox Note • I would love some feedback about whether you think this has enough room for algorithmic finesse to stick with or whether it should be . • Any kind of early questions or ideas are welcome, too. Introduction Every day on my way to work I have to take one of two neighboring elevators – and often, they are not currently on my floor, so I have to press a button and wait for it to stop by. Ever so often, I get the feeling the software behind these elevators was written by an army of monkeys who finally managed to type some program that would compile. But it makes me think: isn't there a more clever way to manage elevators? Maybe you can help me make my way to work less annoying by implementing a new controller software! The Challenge You must write a complete program that takes input from stdin (or similar) and print to stdout (or similar). Your program will receive the following arguments: • The first line consists of two space-separated numbers: • The number N of neighboring elevators your software will have to manage. • One integer H specifying the number of the top floor level for the building (the ground floor level is marked 0, so H = 5 means there are six stories). • All subsequent lines of input are a space-separated list of two numbers in the range [0, H] with the following meaning: • The first integer specifies the level on which a passenger is requesting an elevator. • The second integer specifies the level this passenger would like to get to. During each time tick, your program must print (to stdout or similar) one line with N characters wherein each character specifies what an elevator does (from left to right = first to last elevator). The following commands are available: • D for "Move elevator one level down." • U for "Move elevator one level up." • S for "Stop the elevator on this level." This command allows any number of passengers to enter or exit the elevator on this level. This will happen automatically and people will only exit the elevator on the level they want to get to. Furthermore, all elevators are rather small and have a maximum capacity of 2 people. So no elevator can take more than two people. Since people are generally nice, they apply a first come, first serve pattern. Passengers who are "too many" will just wait the next turn. If two (or more) elevators happen to stop on the same level with people waiting to enter, they will start filling up the elevators from left to right. All N elevators will start on the ground level – 0 – upon start of the program. As always, standard loopholes apply. No cheating, no networking etc. If possible, please submit your answer with a link to an online interpreter or instructions on how to run it. Example Input: 2 3 2 0 3 1  Possible Output: UU UU SU DS DD SD SS  Here are more examples, but to keep the post short, newlines are represented as | and input/output is separated by #: 2 3|0 1|0 2|0 3 # SS|UU|SU|UU|SS|US|SS 1 2|0 1|1 2|1 0|1 0 # S|U|S|U|S|D|S|D|S  Scoring This is a . There will be an unknown test case which I will only reveal after having accepted the winning answer (so you can make sure I didn't make scores up), but not before as to prevent answers optimizing for that test case only. The score will be the number of steps your submission prints (= number of lines of your program's output). The lowest score wins with votes as a tiebreaker. Verification You may use the following snippet to verify your submission: TODO (I will write this once I plan on publishing this question) The Invincible Rock Paper Scissors Make a bot that plays Rock Paper Scissors with the player. The bot should prompt the user for input (either rock, paper, or scissors) and then output the result. The result should include the user's hand, the bot's hand, and who won. An example of an acceptable result output would thus be: I played rock! You played scissors! I won!  Another acceptable output: The bot's rock beat the player's scissors.  This is the underhanded part: the bot should always win. However, the player has access to the source code of the program, so you should try and make the part of the code that causes the bot to always win as inconspicious as possible. Here is an example in Python 2.x. If it were posted, it would not get many upvotes because it is extremely obvious that the bot will always win. A better answer would appear to be fair to the player, but in fact still causes the bot to win every time. user_choice = raw_input("Pick a hand (rock, paper, or scissors)...") if user_choice == "rock": print "I played paper! You played rock! I won!" elif user_choice == "paper": print "I played scissors! You played paper! I won!" elif user_choice == "scissors": print "I played rock! You played scissors! I won!"  Concerns My main concern with this challenge is that it may be a close duplicate of random script that isn't actually random. I am not sure if the requirement for having a different output for the user's input (while maintaining the illusion of randomness) is enough to differentiate this challenge from the original underhanded random challenge. Feedback on this issue is appreciated. • In my opinion, "underhanded" does not imply "always win." I think there are many more options for underhanded behaviors. For example, someone could write a RPS program with a weakness to be exploited by those with "insider info." That can help this challenge avoid being a duplicate. – PhiNotPi Nov 8 '14 at 17:47 Calculate the Delacorte Number of a square - posted • Please help me improve this and add it to the directory (I can't). How to get syntax highlighting here? Please vote if you think it is a good idea and should be posted. – maf-soft Oct 24 '14 at 10:57 • I think you should include all relevant definitions in sufficient detail so that the challenge is self-contained and people don't need to follow the links to understand the challenge. – Martin Ender Oct 24 '14 at 12:35 • Thanks for the comment, I was also thinking about it. My current short explanation is a little golfed itself :) - but I have an explanation, I have an example and the expected result (just added, please refresh). What is your suggestion I should add from the linked page? I think it is not necessary to have the same detail. – maf-soft Oct 24 '14 at 13:23 • It's more readable to put the short explanation first and then the link to a more detailed explanation. I don't think that a more detailed explanation is necessary, though, as long as you clear up the ambiguity about which metric you're using for "distance²". It would be good to have a test case which is a bit less structured. It would be very good to have a brief statement of motivation (which would seem to be that there's a contest to maximise and minimise Delacorte numbers for a given side length). – Peter Taylor Oct 24 '14 at 17:05 • Finally, if the space dedicated to explaining your scoring system is 4 or 5 times as much as the space dedicated to explaining the problem, you've probably over-complicated it. What's wrong with asking for a function which takes the square as an array or string, optionally with a second argument giving the side length? – Peter Taylor Oct 24 '14 at 17:09 • Ok, I improved it, what do you think now? Regarding the over-complicated rules: I am pretty new here, and from the code-golf-challenges I have seen, I got the feeling that this detail is necessary. I would prefer the same fixed rules (or a set I can choose from) for all challenges, so it would not be necessary to post them here. Asking for a function sounds wrong because some languages have a different concept. With my code examples I just wanted to give a feeling about the intentions, but I cannot do that for all languages... Side length should not be given as input, only the square. – maf-soft Oct 24 '14 at 19:29 • Thanks for adding this to the directory. I will post this soon if I don't get any more comments. Is the Title ok? Any hints? It's my first one. – maf-soft Oct 31 '14 at 14:43 • If you want a specific person to see a comment, you should use an @ tag: e.g. @maf-soft. The reason you were notified about Martin's and my comments was that they're in reply to your answer: I've only just seen that you replied to me because I came looking for the question to ask how you're getting on in the actual contest. I still think it would benefit from saying that you're measuring Euclidean distance (as opposed to e.g. Manhattan distance). – Peter Taylor Nov 3 '14 at 23:27 • As for the scoring: code-golf implies a set of rules, and there are some currently active discussions in meta.codegolf about default assumptions on program vs function and forms of I/O. – Peter Taylor Nov 3 '14 at 23:28 • @PeterTaylor, thanks. Is that you in the highscore list? :) I currently don't have the time to work on it, but i will. It's fun! Of course you are right, that it's not immediately clear what distance is meant. But I think, due to the examples, it is clear enough. I think it's ok and intended, when contestants have to think a bit :) – maf-soft Nov 4 '14 at 9:49 • Yes, that's me. I'm quite pleased with how well I've managed to do already with fairly basic techniques. – Peter Taylor Nov 4 '14 at 10:09 • @PeterTaylor, yes, reaching a score of 24.5 of the maximum 25 doesn't require very clever-clever effort :) but you will see, getting under the top ten is really hard and you need a lot of free time, I don't have. Two months left! – maf-soft Nov 5 '14 at 10:22 • It's posted now (did I do it right?), can anyone remove it from the dictionary? – maf-soft Nov 10 '14 at 15:58 • @maf-soft I removed it from the directory. The next step is deleting this sandbox answer to clear up space. – PhiNotPi Nov 10 '14 at 17:04 Lua Variables From Arguments? In this question I challenge you to get variables from function arguments in Lua. The least amount of characters wins. Basically I'm asking for you to create a function that takes an argument, and prints out the variable as a string. Please note it has to work in a standalone Lua console. • I don't know Lua, but I have no idea what this is asking. Do we need to extract the names of the arguments? Their values? You will probably benefit from including an example input/output for this program/function... – FryAmTheEggman Nov 14 '14 at 22:17 • @Fry The variable, for example function hello(m) print(m) end m is an argument, the variable is m. – warspyking Nov 14 '14 at 22:26 • @warspyking This definitely needs a proper spec. I do know a little Lua, but I'm still not sure what you're asking for. Please provide examples. Also, I should warn you that language-specific challenges are usually frowned upon, unless there are some reasons why the challenge only makes sense in that particular language (which I can't tell yet). – Martin Ender Nov 14 '14 at 23:28 • OK, so that is still quite ambiguous: do you mean for us to get a reference to the variable? You need to tell us precisely where we get the information from (STDIN, file, etc) and precisely where and how to output it in the question. As it stands, this would be closed as unclear if posted. – FryAmTheEggman Nov 15 '14 at 0:03 • @Martin Why is language specific questions frowned upon? – warspyking Nov 15 '14 at 0:11 • @Fry I added a little more detail in. – warspyking Nov 15 '14 at 0:12 • @warspyking Because most of the time, there's no good reason to exclude people from your challenge you don't happen to know the same programming language as you (and quite often, language-specific challenges are a good indicator that someone's trying to use PPCG to outsource their homework, although that's probably not the case here). So if this challenge makes sense in other languages, you should try to be inclusive. And you should really add an example to show us what exactly you're asking. – Martin Ender Nov 15 '14 at 0:33 • @Martin I don't know any other language to be able to confirm the answer. – warspyking Nov 15 '14 at 0:45 • @warspyking If you added an example, some people might be able to tell you. ;) – Martin Ender Nov 15 '14 at 0:46 • If I understand the refined question correctly, the goal is to retrieve the parameter names for the parameters of a function from inside the function itself, using reflection-style capabilities. With some help, I think that could be turned into something language-agnostic (though it'd need some good way of disallowing hardcoded results). – FireFly Nov 15 '14 at 0:50 • @FireFly Yep, you've understood it correctly. – warspyking Nov 15 '14 at 0:55 Number Datasheets code-golf Write a program that accepts an integer n where 1 < n < 10000 and prints some facts about it. Each fact must be on a separate line, and in the order shown here. • even or odd • prime or composite • deficient, perfect, or abundant • square if it's a perfect square • cube if it's a perfect third power • fourth power if it's a perfect fourth power • fifth power, sixth power, etc. as appropriate (each on a separate line) • square-free if it has no factors that are perfect squares (except 1) • triangular if it's a triangular number • pentagonal if it's a pentagonal number • hexagonal, heptagonal, octagonal, nonagonal, decagonal as appropriat • 11-gonal, 12-gonal ... k-gonal. However, these should only be printed if k is less than n or if k is less than 10. In any event, each of these term is to be on a separate line. • x totatives where x is the count of the numbers between 0 and n that are coprime to n • lucky if it's a lucky number • Fibonacci if it's a Fibonacci number • Lucas if it's a Lucas number • Leonardo if it's a Leonardo number • repdigit in base b if it's a repdigit in base b, where 1 < b < n-1 • If it's a repdigit in multiple such bases, instead print repdigit in base b, c, d • strictly non-palindromic if it's not a palindrome in any base b where 1 < b < n-1 Any feedback would be appreciated. • Needs more links. I'd remove the polygonal numbers - that's a lot of hard-coded names to effectively duplicate your earlier question. – Peter Taylor Nov 18 '14 at 7:42 • How many powers do we need to support? And are empty lines in the output allowed? – Martin Ender Nov 18 '14 at 10:12 • I think you're asking for too many things. I wouldn't want to code all those different properties. Maybe cut down to about 5? – xnor Nov 19 '14 at 8:35 • I agree with xnor that there's too many things here. Regarding @MartinBüttner's comment, the first thing I would change is limit the powers to no more than cube, and polygonal numbers to no more than triangular. You need to clearly define all the different types of number too. There's a difference between polygonal numbers and centred polygonal numbers that would need to be clarified. Off the top of my head I have no idea what lucas and leonardo numbers are – Level River St Nov 27 '14 at 20:38 Math golf This challenge is about writing code that outputs the smallest formula possible for a sequence of position integers. Input I will choose 10 from the following test sequences of positive integers. However, please do not hardcode these into your answers. If I suspect this has happened, I reserve the right to change the test sequences without notice. Your code should accept standard in with one list of comma separated sequences per line. 1, 2, 7 12, 9, 7, 5 40, 25, 16, 10, 7 2240, 1225, 679, 373, 213, 149, 141, 133 8064, 3969, 1969, 974, 494, 254, 164, 134, 119 118272, 53361, 24196, 10958, 5027, 2399, 1271, 863, 746, 695, 668, 665 1, 4, 36, 400, 4900 96, 1280, 17920, 258048, 3784704, 56229888, 843448320 72, 800, 9800, 127008, 1707552, 23557248, 331273800 40, 224, 1064, 3808, 21280, 59200, 322600 2240, 832, 240, 72, 20, 6, 3 53760, 17152, 4480, 1248, 384, 104, 44, 22, 11 329472, 86656, 20800, 5536, 1536, 440, 124, 44, 19, 8, 4 32800768, 6856704, 1536000, 394752, 103936, 27136, 7936, 2080, 656, 264, 132, 66, 33 206389248, 33216512, 7029760, 1743360, 448000, 112640, 30144, 8288, 2096, 688, 284, 102, 46, 18, 9 20956446720, 2527756288, 510181376, 122363904, 30720000, 7643136, 1972224, 508416, 136192, 35456, 10816, 3296, 1360, 632, 292, 146, 73 Output A math formula per input line which maps an index n starting at 1 to the relevant value. A formula can be made up as follows. It can consist of the sequence variable n, integer constants, *, /, -, +, !, (, ), ^ or (m,k). These are to be interpreted in their normal mathematical sense with (m,k) to be read as binomial(m,k). The formula has to be well formed with, for example, parentheses matching and the order of precedence of operators will be the usual mathematical ordering. A special rule applies to the factorial function ! which requires parentheses if the ^ or ! operators are to be applied to the result of the factorial. I.e. it is (n!)^2 and not n!^2. Note that the !! is never allowed. Unary - also requires brackets if any further operator is applied to the result on the left hand side or if the result is to be raised to a power. For example it is n*(-1) and not n*-1. Score I will test your code on a number of sequences of integers that I make. The score is the sum of the number of characters in all your outputs. Example output For the sequence that starts 96, 1280 above, the output 4^(n+1)*(2*(n+1))!/((n+1)!)^2 gives a score of 29. • It's an interesting idea, but it sounds brutally hard in the absence of gimmicks. There is, generally speaking, no systematic or efficient procedure for turning a sequence of numbers into a formula. – COTO Nov 21 '14 at 1:22 • There's always the polynomial of degree length-1... which is the only realistic option if you write something longer than 10 characters. One could try to golf the polynomial a bit but anyway it wouldn't be a great challenge. – feersum Nov 21 '14 at 2:19 • @feersum and COTO , The challenge is interesting, I hope, if many of the test cases come from sequences which do have short formulae. You are right that if the sequences are genuinely chosen at random it is perhaps not so interesting. – user9206 Nov 21 '14 at 15:22 Generalized Array Indexing Most programming languages provide an array datatype (which might be called a list or a vector) that supports indexing. Given an array and a nonnegative integer, we can fetch the element of the array at that position: [a,b,c][0] = a. Some languages, like Python, support a more general indexing system, where passing a negative index counts the position from the end: [a,b,c][-1] = c. But why stop there? In this challenge, your task is to provide another generalization of this operation. In other words, you must provide a function that takes in an array and a number, and returns something, up to the following restrictions: 1. If a nonnegative integer is passed to the function, it must return the element of the array at that position. In other words, it must be an extension of the array indexing operation. 2. It must support more indices than just nonnegative integers, like negative integers, fractions, complex numbers, or even strings. In other words, it must be a proper extension. If necessary, you may restrict the types of elements your arrays may contain, so you may choose to only handle arrays of, say, floating-point numbers, or other arrays. This is a popularity contest, so the answer with the most upvotes wins. • I'm sure people would come up with some fun ideas, but I believe this is currently a bit too broad as it stands (the telltale sign being a "something" in italics in your spec). – Martin Ender Nov 25 '14 at 17:37 • That was my fear too. I don't know whether this can be turned into a good challenge without changing the idea completely, but I'll leave it here for now. – Zgarb Nov 27 '14 at 16:43 Play Chopsticks Disclaimer: Please fix the question and the scoring if they are not satisfactory. I am probably not qualified to run and score entries because I am not entirely familiar with the logistics of running two programs against one another, and, as such, I will not be posting this question to the main page myself. So, if anyone wants to take this off my hands, feel free. I just really like this idea and want to see it happen. Chopsticks Wikipedia article Your challenge is to write a program that, given the current position of the game as input (how many fingers on each hand), outputs the next move it chose to take. Rules of the game (Normal rules, no variations) 1. When a hand's finger-count becomes >= 5, it's finger-count becomes 0. 2. Splitting/transferring is allowed. You CAN bring a dead hand back by transferring some fingers from your other hand. 3. However, splitting/transferring is not allowed if the move only results in you having swapped your hands. (eg. no prolonging the game by "doing nothing") 4. A player loses if both their hands are dead. Input You will receive as input the number of fingers on each of your and your opponents hands. Input will be given in the following format: #_on_your_LH #_on_your_RH #_on_opponent_LH #_on_opponent_RH  Examples: 1 1 1 1  or 4 0 3 2  Output Your program will output your move base on the input. Key: First number: 0 (your LH) 1 (your RH) 2 (transfer from your LH to your RH) 3 (transfer from your RH to your LH) Second number: If first number was 0 or 1: 0 (opponent's LH) 1 (opponent's RH) If first number was 2 or 3: 1-3 (# of fingers to transfer)  Examples: 0 0 (tap opponent's RH with your LH) 0 1 (tap opponent's LH with your LH) 1 0 (tap opponent's RH with your RH) 1 1 (tap opponent's LH with your RH) 2 1 (transfer 1 finger from your LH to your RH) 3 2 (transfer 2 fingers from your RH to your LH)  Scoring Each entry will be made to play a game against every other entry. If a game does not end after 100 rounds (?), it will be declared a tie. Two points will be awarded for every win and one point will be awarded for every tie. Entry with the most points is the king of the chopstick-hill. • This sounds so familiar, I feel like it has been posted before, either on main or in the sandbox (or maybe it was just discussed in chat), but the game has so many names that it's hard to find right now. (Looks like it was the sandbox and died off right away: chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/17654246#17654246) – Martin Ender Nov 29 '14 at 23:01 • @MartinBüttner I still think that this should be done. Perhaps it could be made more interesting by allowing the programs to see the whole game, not just on a turn-by-turn basis, and they then could adapt to their opponents. Though I believe that would require networking / competing on a server, of which I know little. Well, in any case, like I said, I just thought this was a good idea and wanted to see it happen, though I don't feel up to taking the responsibility to do it myself. If this dies off too... oh well. – kukac67 Nov 29 '14 at 23:23 • I'm not sure if I remembered right, but I thought Chopsticks was a solved game for the second player? – Sp3000 Nov 30 '14 at 3:27 • @Sp3000 Dang it. I think you're right. I wonder if any of the variations to the game change it enough for it to require more strategy and not be a solved game. – kukac67 Nov 30 '14 at 20:12 N-gon Naming Challenge Given the word name of a polygon n, you must output the number of sides polygon n. Examples Input: triangle Output: 3 Input: dodecagon Output: 12 Input: megagon Output: 1000000 Input: hexahexagon Output: 66  Winning The shortest code wins. The list of shape names can be found here with instructions on how shape names are constructed. Use the alkane naming system. • In case you aren't aware, there's a pretty simple formula to find these numbers. – Geobits Nov 13 '14 at 19:58 • @Geobits This is more parsing of the shape name – Beta Decay Nov 13 '14 at 19:59 • For some reason I thought that part was a dupe, but it turns out I can't find anything except going the other way (3->tri). – Geobits Nov 13 '14 at 20:02 • You'll probably need to define an upper limit, like this question did – FryAmTheEggman Nov 13 '14 at 20:46 • If the challenge is really about parsing the shape name, then just have that be the question. – xnor Nov 14 '14 at 10:12 • It might be a good idea to point out if we need to support Tetracontadigon, as well as 42-gon. – FryAmTheEggman Nov 19 '14 at 15:30 • The rules on that new link are confusing. What is a hexahectogon? 6100? 600? – FryAmTheEggman Nov 20 '14 at 19:13 • Can we really trust a site that says Is there actually a name for a 27 sided pentagon? Yes there is.? – feersum Nov 20 '14 at 21:56 • @feersum Yeah... I was hoping to find a long list of every shape from 3 to n... That's the best I could do ATM – Beta Decay Nov 21 '14 at 7:03 • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygon has a better list with more rules than the site you linked. Anyway, both sites offer various alternative names and you should specify which are required, and the maximum number of sides to be supported. It is very, very unclear how a polygon with more than 1999 sides should be named. – Level River St Nov 30 '14 at 12:40 • @steveverrill A polygon with more than 1999 sides -> circle ;) – FryAmTheEggman Dec 1 '14 at 17:34 Help Bob the Builder survive the communists, and fast! The communists have taken over the world and you are the last remaining tower builder. In order to surive you must show that you are able to build towers and fast! The challenge Bob is given a set of building blocks b, and a number n of towers to build. Since we are in communist land the towers should have as equal of an height as possible. The catch is that you are only given 180 seconds to build the towers. The goal is to minimize the std of the tower height. In addition you have to build towers at three different sites. Which means three different sets of building blocks and three different set of towers. Input & Output blocks = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] towers = 3  The ouput should be on the form 7 6 2 8 5 4 1 9 5 std = 0  Here the towers are built vertically. The std is calculated as follows std = sqrt[(mean - tower1)^2 + (mean - tower2)^2 + ...]  where tower1 represents the height of that tower and mean is the average of the heights. mean = (tower1 + tower2 + ... + towern)/towers  Example 2 Input blocks = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] towers = 2  Output 5 3 2 4 1 9 6 7 9 0 std = 0.7071  Since mean = (23+22)/2 = 22.5 and std = [(22.5-23)^2+(22-23)^2]^(1/2) = [1/4+1/4]^(1/2) = (1/2)^1/2. These two are examples of optimal outputs. Since the problem is NP hard an optimal solution within a reasonable time is impossible. Scoring The blocks for the three building sizes are given below. The sum of these three tests judge your performance. Lowest score wins. Eg  score = 100*std(1) + 50*std(2) + std(3)  Where std stands for the standard deviation obtained at building site n. Do not try to cheat and make a code that runs longer than 300 seconds. The KGB (Eg me) performs regurarly controls. Question for meta 1) Is the problem clear enough? Eg use the three vectors and distribute them equally 2) Is the scoring now fair? Must have a run time beneath 3 minutes, lowest score wins. Building site 1: 2 towers Building site 2: 3 towers Building site 3: 23 towers • How is this different to your previous question? – Peter Taylor Dec 14 '14 at 17:48 • In previous question the number of elements in each tower were fixed, here only the number of towers are fixed. There is now a logical time constraint as well as a fair score system. Plus slightly more creative vectors. Is that enough? – N3buchadnezzar Dec 14 '14 at 18:07 Quine is love, quine is life (well, almost) Yes, another Life challenge. Inspired by this. Challenge Write a program (the generator) that, when given a representation of a Game of Life board on STDIN (or in a file if you like), outputs a program which contains a string representation of a Game of Life board in its source code. The representation will be in the following format:  h w x1 y1 x2 y2 x3 y3 . . . xw yh  where: • h = height of the grid • w = width of the grid • xi yi = coordinates of a live cell When run, the new program should output its own source code - with a catch: the string in the output must represent the generation following the one previously encoded. (We shall call this program the replicator.) Other stuff • All live cells will be provided as input, so all other cells may be assumed to be dead. • 0,0 is at the bottom left. • Both programs (the generator and the replicator) need not be in the same language. • There may be a width-one border around the string representation for a -10% bonus in score. Scoring Your score on a particular input will be defined as the length of the generator plus the average length of the first 100 generations of the replicator. Your final score will be the average of your scores on all the test cases. The lowest score wins! Question Should we impose a format for the string representation, like maybe * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *  or should we let the GolfScripters and CJammers of PPCG use their unprintable black magic? :D • Just to check, the scoring formula is generator_length + sum(replicator_lengths)/100? The bolding is a tad misleading: it seems to imply that the division is performed also on the generator length (which would be very odd). – FryAmTheEggman Dec 22 '14 at 3:33 • That is indeed what I meant, but you're right; it is a bit odd. Fixing. – Soham Chowdhury Dec 22 '14 at 4:27 • The scoring formula is generator_length + sum(lengths of first 100 replicators)/100. – Soham Chowdhury Dec 22 '14 at 4:30 • This looks like a less interesting version of this Life quine question. If you do decide to allow flexibility in the representation, you'll need to be careful to avoiding being too close a duplicate. Other than that, I don't understand what h and w are (is there an unspoken assumption of boundary conditions?) nor what you mean about 0,0 being the bottom left (since the output doesn't care which directions the axes run) or about having a border around the string representation. – Peter Taylor Dec 24 '14 at 11:06 Query the icosahedral graph You've been sent back in time to 1973 to change history by remaking a clone of Hunt the Wumpus. You need to code a network of rooms in the game that forms an icosahedral graph, whose vertices correspond to the 12 vertices of the icosahedron connected by edges, unlike the dodecahedral graph used in the original game. Each room connects to five others. Your goal is to write a program or function that takes the ID numbers of two of the twelve rooms, and returns one value if the rooms are adjacent, and a different value if not. Due to space constraints, you code needs to use as few bytes as possible. You can choose what ID's to label the 12 rooms, but due to hardware constraints, they must be numbers from 0 to 255. Specifying the ID's doesn't count for the code length. Input Two distinct ID numbers from 0 to 255 out of 20 of your choice. You can't restrict which order two numbers appear in. Output A consistent value for pairs of numbers that correspond to adjacent rooms in your ID scheme, and a different consistent value for non-adjacent pairs. Your code may not use any built-ins that represent the dodecahdral graph or related structures. • I haven't actually given much thought to how to do this and how hard or easy this easy. Looking for feedback on this half-baked idea. – xnor Jan 3 '15 at 18:24 • Well, Hunt the Wumpus has been done. Not sure how much more room for variation this subchallenge gives other than ripping out the relevant parts from the answers of the previous challenge. – Martin Ender Jan 3 '15 at 18:37 • @MartinBüttner Fair point, I'll switch to a different graph. – xnor Jan 3 '15 at 18:48 • I'm not sure at the moment which graph the question is trying to talk about, but IIRC both dodecahedron and icosahedron have been done. In fact, you did a dodecahedron graph structure question already. – Peter Taylor Jan 3 '15 at 19:12 • @PeterTaylor I guess I'm not conveying my idea well. The core idea is to make a two-input function whose truth table is isomorphic to some specific graph, with you getting to choose the input labels and the isomorphism. So, it's a question of how to represent the required graph as much as how to code it. For example, if I asked to make a 16-vertex hypercube graph, you could label vertices by the four-bits numbers 0 to 16 the natural way, and check for an edge by whether the xor of the two labels is a power of 2. – xnor Jan 3 '15 at 23:21 • I understood that. How do you feel about switching to the Petersen graph? It's comparable in size and complexity, but it's definitely not treading on the toes of the previous questions. – Peter Taylor Jan 4 '15 at 9:16 • @PeterTaylor The Petersen graph happens to have a compact and elegant solution that's surely optimal. Got any other graphs to suggest? – xnor Jan 5 '15 at 3:16 • Fair point. How about the McGee graph? It's not vertex-transitive, so I think that probably forces a different approach to the group representational approach which was used on the earlier questions. Other interesting options might be the Pappus graph and the Coxeter graph, but they have more symmetry. – Peter Taylor Jan 5 '15 at 20:01 Reverse Polish Notation-ing! Your challenge is simply to write a function which converts a given arithmetical expression into it's Reverse Polish Notation form. Input Your function will be passed in an arithmetical expression, as a string, which may contain any of +-*/^() or a space. For example: 1+1 34 * 7^6 3 * (78 + 7) Output Your function should return the Reverse Polish Notation form of the input with a space between each number. The above inputs would output: 1 1 + 7 6 ^ 34 * 78 7 + 3 * Scoring: This is so shortest code wins. Bonuses are as follows: • -15 for supporting brackets in the input (as in: ()) • -5 for supporting exponents (as in: ^) • -10 for supporting floating point (decimal) numbers (formatted with a dot: 12.56) You should support, at minimum, +, -, * and / operations. Good luck! To the sandbox: • Should I give more examples or is 3 enough? • Do you think the deductions are a fair amount off? Too much? Too little? • Am I missing something really obvious? (I usually am!) • I would call the inputs arithmetical expressions instead of sums, since there can be other operations than addition. – Zgarb Jan 3 '15 at 19:55 • Thanks, I couldn't think of a better word! Edited :) – JamJar00 Jan 3 '15 at 19:57 • Looks like it's a duplicate. – Martin Ender Jan 3 '15 at 20:24 • Gah! Thanks, Nevermind then :( – JamJar00 Jan 3 '15 at 20:25 Print the Twelve Days of Christmas with twelve programming languages Use twelve programming or scripting languages to write twelve programs, embedded within each other, to print the lyrics for Twelve Days of Christmas. Each program will write the next program to file, compile if needed, and execute it. The parent processes will not exit until the last has executed. When they exit, they will print the final verse, program by program. You may only have one file to start with. You may also, optionally, have a text file with each line of the song in it. You must specifiy any dependencies needed to run the programs. For example, if you need a compiler, such as GCC, or PHP or the Java compiler/Java, put them in a list of dependencies. For example: <?php echo "On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:\nA partridge in a pear tree!\n";$code = <<<EOD
public static void main(String [ ] args) {

String nextCode = new String;
System.out.println("On the second day of Christmas, my true love sent to me:");
System.out.print("Two Turtle Doves\nand a Partridge in a Pear Tree\n");
nextCode = "(Next code to be written is in here)";
PrintWriter writer = new PrintWriter("thirdDay.c", "UTF-8");
/*
* and write the next program, in this case, thirdDay.c to file and so on....
*/
}
EOD;
file_put_contents("secondDay.java", \$code);
exec("javac secondDay.java");
echo exec("java secondDay");
echo "and a Partridge in a pear tree"; // runs after the other twelve have run
?>


Apologies for my rusty Java.

To reiterate:

1. The program is started
2. The program prints the appropriate verse
3. The program writes the source code for the next program to file, which in turn contains the code for the rest, and so on.
4. The program compiles (if needed) the next program, and runs it.

The final program will only print the line for Day 12. It will then exit, returning to its parent program, which will print the second line - Day 11, exit, and so on. In my example, this line will run last:

echo "and a Partridge in a pear tree"; // runs after the other twelve have run


Have fun with those quote marks. I started with PHP and Heredoc for a reason ;)

Assume that this will be run in a Linux/Unix terminal. Windows is okay if you can pull it off.

This is a popularity contest. Assuming that you can get everything escaped properly ;)

Merry Christmas!

• My comments on self-contradiction from the original question still stand. – Peter Taylor Jan 6 '15 at 21:43
• I'll edit it later, but since it's past Christmas, it's got lower priority now. Can you provide an example of self-contradiction? Perhaps I can remove the offending part to clear it up. (While the first 11 print the full song until day x, number twelve only prints its first line (Partridge) and then exits, sub-program number eleven then prints Turtle doves, exits, and so on until the original program.) – Austin Burk Jan 7 '15 at 0:29
• "It's not clear whether the final output should be the full lyrics of the song (one verse per program) or just the last verse (one line per program); or whether each program in the chain should print then execute (as per example code and numbered breakdown) or execute and then print (as per "*It will then exit, returning to its parent program, which will print Day 11, exit, and so on")*" – Peter Taylor Jan 7 '15 at 23:31

A natural divisor

Expressiveness, natural language elements and readability, these are just a few of the awesome features/ideologies modern high-level languages promise us. But how "readable" and "natural" are these languages really? Can you really read them as they were english? In this challenge you have to prove how (un)natural your preferred language really is.

Challenge

You're to write a program that accepts a list/string of numbers from the STDIN, and outputs their greatest common divisor to the STDOUT. However you also need to write a complete description of your program, an english explanation of your entire program. The challenge is to make your program resemble the description as much as possible. As in a perfect natural programming language there would be no difference, your score will be the Levenshtein distance between your program and your description.

Rules

• Your description can only contain correct english sentences. The sentences must be at least six words long.
• The description must contain the full and correct process of your program. Nothing more or less. An example can be found below. As a general rule: a programmer that doesn't understand your language should completely understand your description and should be able to recreate the exact algorithm.
• Your program should use the universal accepted definition to calculate the greatest common divisor. If the input only contains 0's, you have to output 0.

Example

This is a fibonacci function to illustrate how a description should look like:

PROGRAM:
def F(n):
if n == 0: return 0
elif n == 1: return 1
else: return F(n-1)+F(n-2)

DESCRIPTION:
Define a function F with input n. If n equals 0, return 0.
Else, if n equals 1, return 1.
Else, return the output of F with input n minus 1,
plus the output of F with input n minus 2.


Score

As mentioned earlier, your score is the levenshtein distance between your description and your program. You can calculate your levenshtein distance with the following snippet (thanks doorknob):

var f=document.getElementById("f"),g=document.getElementById("s"); function h(){var a=f.value,e=g.value;if(128<a.length)a="<span style='color:red'>First program is too long!</span>";else if(128<e.length)a="<span style='color:red'>Second program is too long!</span>";else{if(0===a.length)a=e.length;else if(0===e.length)a=a.length;else{var d=[],b;for(b=0;b<=e.length;b++)d[b]=[b];var c;for(c=0;c<=a.length;c++)d[0][c]=c;for(b=1;b<=e.length;b++)for(c=1;c<=a.length;c++)d[b][c]=e.charAt(b-1)===a.charAt(c-1)?d[b-1][c-1]:Math.min(d[b-1][c-1]+1,Math.min(d[b][c-1]+1,d[b-1][c]+ 1));a=d[e.length][a.length]}a="Distance = <strong>"+a+"</strong>"}document.getElementById("d").innerHTML=a}f.onkeyup=h;g.onkeyup=h;
<h3 id=ft>program</h3>
<textarea id=f rows=7 cols=80 style="width:100%"></textarea>
<h3 id=st>description</h3>
<textarea id=s rows=7 cols=80 style="width:100%"></textarea>
<p id=d></p>

Sandbox questions/notes:

• The question was just crazy idea for the most part. Do you think this question would work?
• Are there any languages that would get an unfair advantage? Are there more things I should ban?
• I know the description of the program description is somewhat subjective, so the answers would mostly involve being creative with their description. Are their any additional rules that could restrain this?
• The six word restriction seems pretty arbitrary. I might want to write If so, return 0. which seems like a perfectly normal sentence in a program description to me. The main trouble will be determining if a description is "good enough". You could do so by defining a vote threshold an answer needs to be eligible, but it's not a perfect solution either. As for the Levenshtein distance, I'm sure Doorknob won't mind you reusing his Stack Snippet. – Martin Ender Jan 10 '15 at 13:27
• @MartinBüttner I added the six words restriction to avoid one word verbs as a sentence, and force some more verbose description. But I might delete/lower it... A vote threshold is not that bad of an idea actually... – Def Jan 10 '15 at 15:11

So, it's around time for finals, and many students want to know what grade they need on their final exam to achieve an A, B, or sometimes a passing grade. There are many factors here - the weight of the final, two quarters having weight, what grade the students want - but it is still a simple task.

Objective

Write a program that will take three integers and output the grade they need to receive on the final.

Input

Three integers. The first two will be from 0 to 100, and the last will be from 1 to 100. They represent the current score in the class, the desired score, and the weight of the final, respectively. A working example can be found here.

Any input outside the expected ranges can have undefined behavior.

Output

The score the student needs to receive on the final exam. This score could be above 100 (every once in a while, students have unrealistic expectations), but if it is a negative number, it is automatically 0. The formula for score is as follows.

(desired - (current score * (1 - weight*.01))) * 100/weight

The output may not be an integer. In this case, round to the nearest hundredth (round up for .##5).

Examples

Input: 100 90 20
50


Input: 65 60 30
48.33


Input: 54 100 25
238


Scoring

This is a challenge, so the shortest code wins.

Bonuses

• -10% if your code can take either 3 or 4 integers as input. If four integers are taken, then the first two are averaged to give what would normally be the first integer. Each of the first two integers here represents a quarter grade.

What other bonuses should I add? I can't think of many right now, but even one or two more would be helpful.

• Maybe it's British vs American English, but I find that this question uses some words rather strangely. When the output talks about finding a score, that's the word I expect to see in almost every instance of grade; I would understand grade to mean the letter A, B, etc. That aside, there are some small changes which I think are improvements on either side of the pond: change expected to desired, and specify with the rounding which way to round ##.##5. It would probably also be useful to state explicitly that scores are always out of 100. – Peter Taylor Jan 14 '15 at 8:36
• Oh, corner cases. Input 80 80 0 is apparently legal, but gives NaN; I would change the spec to say that the weight ranges from 1 to 100. Input 90 80 1 will give a negative number from your formula, but IMO the spec should ask it to be clipped to 0. You could make that a bonus, but I'd make it a core requirement. – Peter Taylor Jan 14 '15 at 8:40
• @PeterTaylor Right on everything there. Edge cases will have to be specified. I didn't realize that there were so many. About the wording, I will see what I can do to make it more logical. – mdc32 Jan 14 '15 at 13:45

Possible resistances from resistors

Meta: Note this is far from done; just putting this idea out so that I can continue working on it. IE way work in progress. I need to specify a lot more of this and I'm putting this here because I know I won't end up working on this if it isn't here.

Given a set of resistors, output all the possible resistances that can be formed with them.

Thoughts so far:

Input:

Input will be a comma-separated or space-separated list of natural numbers such as

1 4 3 2 4 3 5 999


Output:

Output will be all the possible formable resistances, sorted, on its own lines, plus the number of ways to form each resistance.

(no example yet)

• Sounds like a complicated combinatorial problem wrapped around codegolf.stackexchange.com/q/12483/194 . I wouldn't be surprised if you get a few wrong answers and zero correct ones. – Peter Taylor Jan 16 '15 at 8:45

Implement the Henkin quantifier

Your goal is to implement the Henkin quantifier Q_H, a generalized (branching) quantifier on four variables x1,x2,y1,y2 and a Boolean function f. It expresses the idea that for every choice of the x's, there's a choice of the y's so that the four variables satisfy f, so that each y depends only on the corresponding x and not the other one.

The parallelness of the choice of is sometimes represented by stacking the paired quantifiers like this:

This quantfier cannot be expressed in first-order logic.

The parallel choices for the y's are like prisoners being interrogated in separated rooms. They are each asked the respective questions x1 or x2 and must give respective answers y1 and y2 without knowing what the other one was asked, so they are liable to be trapped in inconsistent claims. The guards then evaluate the validity of their responses ointly by some function f that depends on both questions and answers. If the prisoners can always win this game, then f satisfied the Henkin quantifer Q_H.

Formally, the Henkin quantifier Q_H takes in a Boolean function f of four inputs (x1,x2,y1,y2), and evaluates whether the following statement is True:

For every x1 there exists a y1, and for every x2 there exists a y2, so that f(x1,x2,y1,y2) is True, and the choice of y1 depends only on x1 and the choice of y2 depends only on x2.

Alternatively stated in Skolem normal form

There exists functions g1 and g2 so that for every x1 and x2, the function f(x1,x2,g1(x1),g2(x2)) is True.

For this challenge, the domain of discourse will be natural numbers from 0 to 9.

Input:

A function f that takes in four numbers x1,x2,y1,y2, each between 0 and 9 and produces a Boolean output.

Output:

A consistent Truthy value if f satisfies the Henkin quantifier Q_H, and a Falsey value if it does not.

Questions for Sandbox:

1. Does this challenge make any sense?

2. What should the input format be? Not every language can take in functions. What about nested lists? Subsets of four-digit numbers?

• Let me see if I can interpret it. Does it mean that there exist two functions g and h such that f(x1, x2, g(x1), h(x2)) is true for all x1,x2? – feersum Jan 21 '15 at 16:43
• @feersum Yes, that's right. – xnor Jan 21 '15 at 22:27
• The obvious input formats for non-functional languages would seem to be a 4D truth table array boolean[][][][] or a 2D "accepted" array int[][4]. – Peter Taylor Jan 25 '15 at 23:22

The Great, White, North! code-golf - POSTED

• 1. What are the bounds on the relative proportions? 2. What are the RGB codes of the colours? 3. What are the minimum dimensions? 4. What's to stop me using a font which is so different that only I can read it? 5. Does "saves an image" include "writes an image on stdout"? – Peter Taylor Jan 8 '15 at 9:31
• Since there is no clear consensus on this yet you might want to mention explicitly whether you will allow golfed/compressed raw image files as submissions. – Martin Ender Jan 8 '15 at 11:35
• In-universe note: You should probably just save a highly compressed image instead of a program to produce the image. You might then be able to squeeze another syrup recipe on there (or a script to curl the latest hockey scores). – Geobits Jan 12 '15 at 2:33
• @PeterTaylor Been almost two weeks but I finally revamped it. Thoughts? – globby Jan 21 '15 at 2:41
• Sorry, I was travelling. Looks like you sorted all the issues I raised, though. – Peter Taylor Jan 25 '15 at 23:18

Solve a LaserTank level (optimally?) [WIP]

LazerTank is more than just a computer game, it is a blast from the past. In this game, the player controls a tank that shoots lasers and navigates through a series of puzzles. The goal of this challenge is to write a program that solve game levels.

TODO: Actually explain how LaserTank works. There is an instructions page on the website.

Input will be an ASCII representation of the game map. TODO: determine which characters stand for what stuff.

Output will be the list of actions required. There are four possible actions for each step in the solution, "move forward," "turn left," "turn right," and "shoot".