Questions tagged [code-golf]
Code-golf is a competition to solve a particular problem in the fewest bytes of source code.
11,823
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One-dimensional map colouring
It is a well-known fact that you can colour a two-dimensional map with four colours in such a way that two countries with a common border always have different colours. There have already been enough ...
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Write a Web server quine
Write a program that accepts HTTP requests on any port of your choice above 1024, and responds to requests on any URL of your choice with its own source code. It must work with, at least, Firefox and ...
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Just another traffic jam!
One lane is closed, the vehicles have to thread their way in according to the zip-lock system: One car from one lane, the next car from the other lane, always taking turns.
Input: Two vehicle queues, ...
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How Many Paint Tins Do I Need?
Task
Take in 3 inputs. The length of the wall, the height of the wall and the coverage of the paint. Output how many tins of paint are required.
Output
Since there's no way to purchase ...
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Which skill to train?
Story (skip, if you prefer the naked task): You need five skills for an imaginary sport: Speed, strength, endurance, accuracy and tactics. If you achieve a score in each of these disciplines, you can ...
- 1,698
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Convert real numbers between factoradic and positive integer bases
This prompt asked you to convert back and forth to factoradic, but is very limited in scope (only decimal integers from 0 to 10!-1). Your task in this challenge is to reach just a bit further and ...
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Bingo Cards SVG Code [duplicate]
Generate the contents of an SVG file containing 6 bingo cards. Winner is the one that uses the shortest code. A qualifying answer has an output that can be directly pasted in a blank to get the ...
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Shortest C code to display argv in-order
I recently tried to produce the shortest C code possible to display all its command line arguments (which are stored in argv).
I ended with a relatively small piece of code, and I was wondering if ...
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Print the Christmas alphabet
Write a program to print or return one of these strings verbatim:
abcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz
ABCDEFGHIJKMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Notice that there is no L.
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Rudin-Shapiro sequence
The Rudin-Shapiro sequence is a sequence of \$1\$s and \$-1\$s defined as follows: \$r_n = (-1)^{u_n}\$, where \$u_n\$ is the number of occurrences of (possibly overlapping) \$11\$ in the binary ...
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Write a checker quine [duplicate]
Write a program that takes a string as input and returns truthy if the string is the same as the source code, falsy otherwise. The usual restrictions on quines apply.
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Get the Bible verse
Write a program that accesses Project Gutenberg's KJV Bible, either from a file called pg10.txt in the working directory or in any other way that is typical for the ...
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4
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Answer a Loaded Question (with Lojban!) [closed]
A loaded question is something like 'Have you stopped swearing?' in which both yes and no answers mean that I have swore, meaning it is impossible to answer the question if I haven't swore.
However, ...
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Limited letter renderer: BIOPD
There have of course been challenges to render ASCII art fonts here and there. This challenge doesn't add anything to those. In contrary, it subtracts from them for a good reason. If you allow all ...
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German pharmacy payment
Your task is to calculate the amount you have to pay for prescribed medication at a pharmacy in Germany. The amount is simply based on the full price of the item, which will be your input. It is a ...
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Bingo Cards PDF
Write code to generate a PDF file containing 6 bingo cards. Winner is the one that uses the shortest code and needs no actions except for installing a library and running the code. (No Save As PDF). ...
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Golf Transmission
As in, the 5 speed transmission from the original VW Golf GTI.
Print the transmission pattern in as few bytes as possible.
Yes I know this isn't what it actually looks like but the GTI 5 speed shift ...
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22
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Decode the date in Christmas Eve format
This is the inverse of "Encode the date in Christmas Eve format."
Write a program that takes as input the string Christmas, possibly followed by ...
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How many twisted corners?
Your challenge is to output the number of twisted corners given a 2x2 Rubik's Cube scramble.
For the purpose of this challenge, twisted corners are defined as corners where the colour of the top/...
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votes
21
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Monotone sequence beatitude
Provided that the input is a monotone sequence of three or more integers:
Output -2 if the sequence strictly decreases. Example: [7,4,3,2]
Output -1 if the ...
- 5,447
11
votes
8
answers
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Add two natural numbers
Given two natural numbers (less than 100) as input print the sequence of intermediate results obtained when computing the sum of the two numbers using only the following operations1:
...
- 5,677
7
votes
1
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Literate Programming in Base 26
Your task is to convert non-empty strings - between strings using the 26 letters, and programs, which are strings of bytes, where each byte has 256 possible values. You should use the same codepage ...
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Robinson Schensted correspondence
[The explanations of the algorithm come from here. I recommend reading it for a beautiful description of the algorithm.]
This challenge is to implement the Robinson Schensted correspondence.
Input
A ...
- 1,812
6
votes
1
answer
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Determine if a Spider Solitaire game is stale
Let's introduce a simplified variant of the well known Spider Solitaire.
From Wikipedia:
The main purpose of the game is to remove all cards from the table, assembling them in the tableau before ...
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17
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Make Code Printing X without X
The challenge is simple: write a program which takes in some non-empty string \$n\$ consisting of only uppercase and lowercase ASCII letters, and outputs the code for a program (in the same language) ...
- 7,061
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votes
33
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aaabbabbc⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
One element of the list aa, ab, ba, bb, c has been removed, and the remainder shuffled and joined with no separator. Find the missing element.
For example, if the ...
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4
votes
3
answers
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Is there a shortest code to format string
Code Golf Challenge
Given a string of 10 characters:
'abcdefghij'
I want to format it in this pattern and print it in the console in a minimum number of characters:
...
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9
votes
8
answers
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Produce the shortest suffix for an (almost) arbitrary string
I encountered some silly code from a game and I figured this would actually turn into a fun golfing problem, so:
Given any ASCII string in the limited char range specified below.
Append as few ...
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12
answers
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Encode the input to exclude a given character (part 1)
Your task is to write 2 functions/programs. They may share code.
The first function must, given a string and a character, output a new string that does not contain that character.
The second function ...
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16
votes
19
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Find the fairest partition of a list
Given a list of positive integers, partition the list into two sublists such that the absolute value of the difference of the sums over the two sublists is minimal.
The output of the program should be ...
- 5,677
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votes
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Positions on the Pickleball Court
My doubles pickleball group often has five people. Four are playing and one is awaiting the next game. We can represent the state of the game with a string of five characters like abCde. This ...
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Sine using square root [closed]
Given input \$x \in \left\{0,3,6,...,90\right\}\$, output \$\sin\left(x°\right)\$ using integer and \$+ - \times \div ( ) \sqrt{\cdot}\$(square root), e.g. \$\sin(45°)=\sqrt{1\div 2}\$.
Flexible ...
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The too-short urinal problem
The well-known Urinal Protocol states that each person that takes a urinal will take the one furthest from any other taken urinal. But this fails to account for short urinals; in many cases, a person ...
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votes
9
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Seat gangs as far as possible
Imagine there are \$n\$ people \$\{a_1, a_2, \ldots, a_n\}\$ who enter a room in order and sit down in \$n\$ seats, arranged in a row. Each of these people belong to some gang, indicated by an integer ...
- 7,061
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votes
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It's Just Simple Math! [duplicate]
Task
Your boss is on another crusade for 'efficiency.' He wants to encourage the use of numbers with fewer syllables, so that they're easier to discuss in meetings. If you want to take some time off ...
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Compute the conjugate of a partition
We will think of a partition as a sequence of non-increasing integers.
For a given partition into \$n_1, n_2, \dots, n_k\$ with \$n_1 \geq n_2 \dots n_{k-1} \geq n_k = n\$ we write it out with \$n_i\$...
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Finding the power sandwich version 2
Introduction
This question is inspired by this great question.
Challenge
Given a number \$N>0\$, output the largest integer \$a^b\$ that is smaller or equal to \$N\$, and the smallest integer \$c^d\...
6
votes
0
answers
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Shortest CSS selector to select ALL html elements, without using asterisk *
What is the shortest selector (by character count) to select ALL html elements on a web page, without using asterisk (*)? Some examples are the following:
...
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13
votes
10
answers
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Directional Run Length Decoding
We all know run-length decoding: A list of character-length pairs expands to a string of that many characters, so A1B4C2 expands to ...
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votes
19
answers
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Last Week Day Of The Month
Introduction
This challenge was inspired by a seemingly simple task requested at work that couldn't easily be done in Microsoft Teams. At least not from what we could find!
Task
Your task, if you ...
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votes
16
answers
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Finding the power sandwich
Introduction
Finding the closest power to a number is a common enough problem. But what if you need both the next-highest and next-lowest power? In this challenge you must find the closest powers to a ...
- 159
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votes
6
answers
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views
Hermite interpolation
We already have a challenge for polynomial interpolation: given a list of points, output the coefficients of the polynomial that passes through them.
Hermite interpolation is a generalization of ...
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11
votes
6
answers
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Find the conflict-free sitting arrangement
Party time! All of your guests are sitting around a round table, but they have very particular seating requirements. Let's write a program to organize them automatically!
Guests are represented by ...
- 1,698
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votes
7
answers
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Help, I can't bloody well memorize this number!
The Brits aren't exactly known for being good at memorizing stuff. That's why scientists need newspaper articles to find those who are, and that's why it shouldn't be a surprise that they forget more ...
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How can I shorten a C code that repeatedly outputs a number?
I wrote a code that separates the numbers from 1 to 9999 by comma
void p(n){printf("%d,",n);if(n<9999){p(n+1);}}main(){p(1);}
Is there a way to make ...
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Expected number of rounds for this labeling scheme
Task
Here is an interesting math problem:
Let's say that there are \$n\$ indistinguishable unlabeled objects in a bin. For every "round", pull \$k\$ objects randomly out of the bin with ...
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Minecraft XP Orb Amounts
In the video game Minecraft, the player can obtain experience points (XP) from various activities. In the game, these are provided as XP "orbs" of various sizes, each of which give the ...
- 7,061
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Befunge Comment Outline Creator
Befunge is a 2-dimensional programming language, with an instruction pointer (IP).
In Befunge-98, the ; character tells the IP to skip characters up until the next <...
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Is it a valid hidden word?
The Universal Crossword has a set of guidelines for crossword puzzle submissions.
In this challenge we are going to be concerned with their rules for hidden word themes. A hidden word clue consists ...
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