Produce the number 2014 without any numbers in your source code

Question

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It's 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 already, folks, go home.

Woo, 10 years of this challenge!

So, now that it's 2014, it's time for a code question involving the number 2014.

Your task is to make a program that prints the number 2014, without using any of the characters 0123456789 in your code, and independently of any external variables such as the date or time or a random seed.

The shortest code (counting in bytes) to do so in any language in which numbers are valid tokens wins.

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Answer 1

Python 2, 51 bytes

print sum(ord(c) for c in 'Happy new year to you!')

Try it online!

Updated for 2015 thanks to @Frg:

print sum(ord(c) for c in 'A Happy New Year to You!')

Try it online!

Mouse over to see 2016 version:

print sum(ord(c) for c in 'Happy New Year to you!!!')

Try it online!

Answer 2

Go, 2 bytes (UTF-16)

One unicode character (2 bytes in UTF-16, 3 bytes in UTF-8 format), output 2014 as part of an error

—

http://ideone.com/dRgKfk

can't load package: package : 
prog.go:1:1: illegal character U+2014 '—'

Answer 3

Ruby, 15

p Time.new.year

Temporary ;)

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Note that the section of the question

independently of any external variables such as the date or time or a random seed

was not edited in until long after I posted my answer...

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Jan Dvorak offers a great alternative in the comments:

Happy = Time
Happy.new.year

But it's so unenthusiastic. I prefer:

Happy = Time
class Time; alias year! year; end

Happy.new.year!

Or even:

class Have; def self.a; A.new; end; end
class A; def happy; Time; end; end
class Time; alias year! year; end

Have.a.happy.new.year!

And here's correct English punctuation:

def noop x = nil; end
alias a noop
alias happy noop
alias new noop
alias year! noop
def Have x
    p Time.new.year
end

Have a happy new year!

Okay okay, I couldn't help it:

def noop x = nil; end
eval %w[we wish you a merry christmas! christmas and a happy new].map{|x|"alias #{x} noop"}*"\n"
def year!; p Time.new.year; end

we wish you a merry christmas! we wish you a merry christmas!
we wish you a merry christmas and a happy new year!

Answer 4

Befunge-98 (FBBI), 17 11 9 8 bytes

'-:*b-.@

Try it online!

Similar to the old version, but I remembered about '

'-:* pushes 45, duplicates it, then squares it, producing 2025
b-   subtracts 11 from it, resulting in 2014
.@   prints the result, then ends the program

Interestingly, \$45^2-11\$ is the only pairing of numbers a,b where $$(a,b)∈[32,126]\times[10,15]\land a^2-b=2014$$ The significance of those sets is that \$[32,126]\$ is the set of printable ascii characters and \$[10,15]\$ is the set of easily accessible Befunge numbers. I found that pair with this python program:

for a in range(32,127):
    for c in range(10,16):
        if (a**2-c)==2014:
            print("%s,%s"%(a,c))

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Or, if your interpreter supports unicode, then this works:

Befunge 98 - 5 bytes (4 chars)

'ߞ.@

It at least works on http://www.quirkster.com/iano/js/befunge.html with the following code (Befunge 93 - 6 bytes / 5 chars):

"ߞ".@

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Befunge-98 (FBBI), 9 bytes

Old version:

cdd**e-.@

Try it online!

computes the number, then prints it:

cdd pushes numbers to the stack so that it is this: 12,13,13
**  multiplies top three values of stack, which is now: 2028
e   pushes 14
-   subtracts the top two values of the stack, resulting in: 2014
.   prints the numerical value
@   end of program

---

Befunge-98 (FBBI), 17 bytes

Older version:

"*'&("#;:a`j@a+,;

Try it online!

Pushes the ascii values for 2014, -10. Then prints each after adding 10 to it.

Answer 5

Python 2, 26 bytes

print int('bbc',ord("\r"))

Try it online!

Answer 6

Mouse-2002, 4 bytes.

That's 4 bytes of pure, sweet ASCII.

In Mouse, the letters of the alphabet are initialised to the values 0-25. ! is the operator for printing integers, thus this prints 20 then 14 (no intermittent newline).

U!O!

There's no online interpreter available, but here you will find an interpreter written in C (needing some tweaks before one can coerce gcc to compile it) and the same compiled interpreter for Win32 but which works perfectly on Linux with wine.

Here you can find the fixed version of the interpreter, which compiles.

Answer 7

MATLAB, Scala (4 characters, 5 bytes)

You can take advantage of MATLAB's (and Scala's) relatively weak type system, here. The trick is to apply the unary + operation on a string composed only of the character ߞ (of UTF-8 code point U+07DE, or 2014 in decimal). This operation implicitly converts the string to a double (in MATLAB) and to an Int (in Scala):

+'ߞ'

Byte-count details:

• + is ASCII and counts for 1 byte
• ' is ASCII and counts for 1 byte (but appears twice in the expression)
• ߞ is a 2-byte UTF-8 character

Total: 5 bytes

TeX (32 26 characters, as many bytes)

\def~{\the\catcode`}~}~\\~\%\bye

An even shorter alternative (proposed by Joseph Wright) is

\number`^^T\number`^^N\bye

XeTeX/LuaTeX (13 characters, 14 bytes)

If XeTeX or LuaTeX are allowed, UTF-8 input can be used directly (as proposed by Joseph Wright):

\number`ߞ\bye

Answer 8

dc, 6 bytes

DiBBCp

Try it online!

• D pushes 13 on the stack, even tho the input radix is 10 initially
• i changes input radix (to 13 from 10)
• BBC is 2014 base 13.
• p prints.

Console output:

$ dc <<< "DiBBCp"
2014

Answer 9

Scala, 32 29 bytes

+"Happy new year to you!".sum

Try it online!

Well ok if you really want it golfed with any chars, you can use:

Scala, 11 bytes

'@'*' '-'"'

Try it online!

Scala, 22 bytes

"{yz}"map(_-'I'toChar)

Try it online!

Answer 10

R, 72 45 bytes

This is far from the shortest answer posted, but no one has yet posted an answer that

• doesn't use character codes as a substitute for numbers, and
• doesn't call the system date.

Using pure math (okay, and an automatic boolean conversion) in R, from the R console:

x<-(T+T);x+floor(exp(pi)^x)*x*x-(x*x)^(x*x)/x

Try it online!

Prints out the number 2014. T is a pre-defined synonym for true in R. The floor and exp functions are directly available in the base package, as is the pi constant. R doesn't have an increment operator, but repeating the (x*x) turned out to be fewer characters that doing increment and decrement twice each.

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Original version in Javascript (72 characters)

For the simple reason that I could test out in the console, and it doesn't mind a complete lack of whitespace:

m=Math;p=m.pow;t=true;++t+m.floor(p(m.exp(m.PI),t))*t*t++-p(++t,t--)/--t

run in your console and it will print back the number 2014.

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Props to xkcd (and also) for getting me to think about exp(pi):

P.S. If you can make the same algorithm shorter in a different language, post a comment with it.

Answer 11

Python3.4.0b2 (0 bytes)

% python3.4  
Python 3.4.0b2 (v3.4.0b2:ba32913eb13e, Jan  5 2014, 11:02:52) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 

Answer 12

PHP, 9 bytes

This requires PHP 7.1 or lower. It will work in PHP 7.2, but it will result in a warning. No guarantees for any future version.

xxd needed because of binary data (so copying and pasting it would be easier). May return E_NOTICE, but it doesn't really matter, does it?

~ $ xxd -r > 2014.php
0000000: 3c3f 3d7e cdcf cecb 3b                   <?=~....;
~ $ php 2014.php
2014

Alternatively, save this using ISO-8859-1 encoding.

<?=~ÍÏÎË;

Answer 13

C (clang), 33 bytes

main(){printf("%d",'A'*' '-'B');}

Try it online!

Answer 14

Mathematica, 14 characters (or 15 if you count the bitmap as a character)

TextRecognize@

Answer 15

JavaScript (Node.js), 23 bytes

Uses Base 64 Conversion

alert(atob("MjAxNA=="))

Try it online!

Or

alert("MMXIV") // ;)

Answer 16

Perl - 10 characters

This solution is courtesy of BrowserUK on PerlMonks, though I've shaved off some unnecessary punctuation and whitespace from the solution he posted. It's a bitwise "not" on a four character binary string.

say~"ÍÏÎË"

The characters displayed above represent the binary octets cd:cf:ce:cb, and are how they appear in ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15.

Here's the entire script in hex, plus an example running it:

$ hexcat ~/tmp/ten-stroke.pl
73:61:79:7e:22:cd:cf:ce:cb:22
$ perl -M5.010 ~/tmp/ten-stroke.pl
2014

Perl (without high bits) - 14 characters

say'````'^RPQT

This uses a bitwise "or" on the two four-character strings "RPQT" and "````" (that is, four backticks).

$ ~/tmp/fourteen-stroke.pl
73:61:79:27:60:60:60:60:27:5e:52:50:51:54
$ perl -M5.010 ~/tmp/fourteen-stroke.pl
2014

(I initially had the two strings the other way around, which required whitespace between print and RPQT to separate the tokens. @DomHastings pointed out that by switching them around I could save a character.)

Perl (cheating) - 8 characters

This is probably not within the spirit of the competition, but hdb on PerlMonks has pointed out that Perl provides a variable called $0 that contains the name of the current program being executed. If we're allowed to name the file containing the script "2014", then $0 will be equal to 2014. $0 contains a digit, so we can't use it directly, but ${...} containing an expression that evaluates to 0 will be OK; for example:

say${$|}

For consistency, let's do the hexcat-then-perl thing with that:

$ hexcat 2014
73:61:79:24:7b:24:7c:7d
$ perl -M5.010 2014
2014

I think this is cheating, but it's an interesting solution nonetheless, so worth mentioning.

Answer 17

Ruby, 20 bytes

p 'bbc'.to_i ?\r.ord

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Explanation: bbc is 2014 in base 13. Shorter than Python. Not as short as Forth.

Answer 18

PowerShell, 9 bytes

+"ߞ"[""]

Try it online!

ߞ (U+07DE NKO LETTER KA) is counted as two bytes according to the code-golf tag info.

[""] returns the first character from the string ("" is converted to 0). The unary plus opeartor (+) converts the character to an integer.

Answer 19

Javascript, 18 characters

alert(btoa('ÛMx'))

Update: in ES6, using a template literal can save two characters:

alert(btoa`ÛMx`)

The code above is fairly easy to understand by keeping in mind that btoa converts a string into another string according to a set of well-defined rules (RFC 4648). To see how the conversion works, we're going to write the input string "ÛMx" as a sequence of binary digits, where each character is rendered as its 8-bit character code.

Input character          |        Û |        M |        x
Character code (decimal) |      219 |       77 |      120
Character code (binary)  | 11011011 | 01001101 | 01111000

After reorganizing the binary digits in the last row in groups of 6, we get the binary representation of 4 new numbers, corresponding to the Base64 indices of the 4 characters in the string "2014".

Base64 index (binary)  | 110110 | 110100 | 110101 | 111000
Base64 index (decimal) |     54 |     52 |     53 |     56
Output character       |      2 |      0 |      1 |      4

As per HTML specification, the output characters can be retrieved from their Base64 indices according to this table: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-LC/webappapis.html#base64-table.

If you don't care about the details, you could let the browser do the calculations for you and find out that "ÛMx" is the result of evaluating atob('2014') in Javascript.

Answer 20

Scala, 6 bytes

"?="##

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(## is Scala's symbol meaning hashCode, and the Java string "?=" hashes to 2014.)

Scala, 5 bytes

+'ߞ'

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Math on our favorite unicode character produces an Int.

Answer 21

GolfScript, 9 bytes

Yet another GolfScript entry. I believe this is shorter than any of the printable GolfScript entries so far:

"!="{*}*)

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(Peter Taylor's 7-char entry beats it, but includes non-printable control characters.)

I call this the "that's so last year!" entry, because what it actually does is generate the number 2013 in 8 chars, as 33 × 61, and then increments it by one. ;-)

Answer 22

GolfScript, 14 bytes

'-+,/'{)))))}%

Try it online!

How it works: ASCII goes like this:

...
+
,
-
.
/
0
1
2
3
4
...

So, this takes the ASCII codes of each character, subtracts five, and sticks it in a string.

{...}% yields an array of the characters of a string mapped, when given a string as an argument. So, it increments each character by 5 () means increment).

Answer 23

Forth (gforth), 14 bytes

'> '" * '^ - .

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Answer 24

C (gcc), 31 bytes

main(){printf("%o",' b'/'\b');}

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C (gcc), 32 bytes

main(){printf("%x%o",' ','\f');}

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C (gcc), 30 bytes

main(){printf("%x",' j'^'~');}

Try it online!

C (gcc), 30 bytes

main(){printf("%d",'\a\xde');}

Try it online!

Answer 25

Python 2, 32 bytes

print ord(',')*ord('-')+ord('"')

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Probably possible to reduce it using the 2014 th Unicode char ߞ, but I didn't try.

Quincunx notes that

a=ord('.');print a*a-ord('f')

Try it online!

is shorter by three chars.

Answer 26

Python 2, 32 bytes

Had some fun writing this:

my_lst = []
for i in range(33, 126):
    for j in range(i, 126):
        if 2014 - 126 < i * j < 2014 - 33:
            if j not in range(48, 58):
                my_lst.append("ord('" + unichr(i) +
                              "')*ord('" + unichr(j) +
                              "')+ord('" + unichr(2014 - i * j) + "')")

for val in my_lst:
    print val, '->', eval(val)

Prints all the possible ways I can write 2014 using Bruno Le Floch's method:

ord('!')*ord(':')+ord('d') -> 2014
ord('!')*ord(';')+ord('C') -> 2014
ord('!')*ord('<')+ord('"') -> 2014
ord('"')*ord(':')+ord('*') -> 2014
ord(')')*ord('/')+ord('W') -> 2014
ord('*')*ord('-')+ord('|') -> 2014
ord('*')*ord('.')+ord('R') -> 2014
ord('*')*ord('/')+ord('(') -> 2014
ord('+')*ord(',')+ord('z') -> 2014
ord('+')*ord('-')+ord('O') -> 2014
ord('+')*ord('.')+ord('$') -> 2014
ord(',')*ord(',')+ord('N') -> 2014
ord(',')*ord('-')+ord('"') -> 2014

Python 2, 10 bytes

But this is obviously redundant, so if your interpreter is set to utf-8 by default, then all it takes is:

ord(u'ߞ')

Try it online!

Python 2, 83 bytes

Also, thanks to AmeliaBR (for the idea), I tried my best to implement a pure math version:

from math import*
a,b,c=int(e),round(e),ceil(pi);print int(a**(b*c-(c-b))-a*a**c-a)

Try it online!

Answer 27

APL (10 bytes, 7 chars)

⎕UCS'ߞ'

See the revision history for an older version that only works when run in 2014.

Answer 28

R, 20 bytes

@popojan (he is not allowed to post an answer here yet) has provided the solution within 20 characters.

sum(T+T:exp(T+pi))-T

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Output:

[1] 2014

R, 22 bytes

Anonymous user has suggested shorter solution.

strtoi("bbc",pi*pi+pi)

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2014 is BBC in base 13. pi*pi+pi (=13.0112) is treated by R in this context as the integer 13. Output:

2014

R, 30 bytes

cat(a<-T+T,T-T,T/T,a*a,sep="")

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Output:

2014

R, 31 bytes

cat(T+T,T-T,T/T,T+T+T+T,sep="")

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Inspired from the answer by AmeliaBR. Output:

2014

Answer 29

Java (JDK), 77 75 bytes

75 characters if print is added in a class with the main method:

class C{public static void main(String[]a){System.out.print('#'*'<'-'V');}}

Try it online!

It means 35*60-86 which is equal to 2014

Answer 30

CJam, 2 bytes

KE

Try it online!

K and E are variables preset to 20 and 14.
I created CJam in 2014 so it's ok if it doesn't qualify.