Questions tagged [kolmogorov-complexity]
Kolmogorov complexity, informally, is the amount of code it takes to describe or produce a constant object, such as a string or image. When posting a challenge in this category, please make sure it adds something new to existing challenges.
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"Hello, World!"
So... uh... this is a bit embarrassing. But we don't have a plain "Hello, World!" challenge yet (despite having 35 variants tagged with hello-world, and counting). While this is not the most ...
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We're no strangers to code golf, you know the rules, and so do I
Write the shortest program that prints the entire lyrics of "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley.
Rules:
Must output the lyrics exactly as they appear in the above pastebin*. Here's the raw dump:...
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List of primes under a million
This is my first code golf question, and a very simple one at that, so I apologise in advance if I may have broken any community guidelines.
The task is to print out, in ascending order, all of the ...
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1, 2, Fizz, 4, Buzz
Introduction
In our recent effort to collect catalogues of shortest solutions for standard programming exercises, here is PPCG's first ever vanilla FizzBuzz challenge. If you wish to see other ...
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"99 Bottles of Beer"
Write a program that outputs the lyrics to 99 Bottles of Beer, in as few bytes as possible.
Lyrics:
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Print this diamond
This question has been spreading like a virus in my office. There are quite a variety of approaches:
Print the following:
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Print a Tabula Recta!
The Tabula Recta (sometimes called a 'Vigenere Table'), was created by Johannes Trithemius, and has been used in several ciphers, including all variants of Bellaso's Vigenere cipher and the Trithemius ...
user53406
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Print/Output the L-phabet
Inspired by George Gibson's Print a Tabula Recta.
You are to print/output this exact text:
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Bake a slice of Pi
Write a program or function that prints or outputs this exact text (consisting of 142 characters):
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The alphabet in programming languages
Our task is to, for each letter of the (English) alphabet, write a program that prints the alphabet, in a language whose name starts with that letter.
Input: none
Output:
...
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Sing Happy Birthday to your favourite programming language
Your favourite programming language has just had a birthday. Be nice and sing it the Happy Birthday song.
Of course you should accomplish this by writing a program in that language.
The program takes ...
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Draw A Sierpinski Triangle
The Sierpinsky Triangle is a fractal created by taking a triangle, decreasing the height and width by 1/2, creating 3 copies of the resulting triangle, and place them such each triangle touches the ...
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One Ring to rule them all. One String to contain them all
Objectives: Output a String which contains every positive integer strictly below 1000.
The obvious answer would be to concatenate every one of them, and that would create a String of 2890 characters (...
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In Honor of Adam West
Adam West passed away, and I'd like to honor his memory here on PPCG, though I doubt he knew of our existence. While there are many, many different things that this man is known for, none are more ...
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The Programming Language Quiz, Mark II - Cops
A repost of this challenge. Meta discussion. Sandbox post. Body of the question similar to the original
Robber's challenge
This cops and robbers is now (08/03/2018) closed to further competing cop ...
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Minecraft Mirrored
This is Calvin. Just trying to get 20 rep so this user can chat in the PPCG Minecraft Server chatroom.
Write a program or function that takes in a positive integer.
If the integer is even (2, 4, 6, ....
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Print a 10 by 10 grid of asterisks
Background
This is a standard textbook example to demonstrate for loops.
This is one of the first programs I learnt when I started learning programming ~10 years ago.
Task
You are to print this exact ...
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Print X without X (cop's thread)
This is the cop's thread of a cops-and-robbers challenge. You can view the robber's thread here
A pretty common beginner style question is to print some string, but there's a catch! You need to do it ...
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Just repeat yourself
Write a program that outputs
Do not repeat yourself!
Your program code must respect the following constraints :
its length must be an even number
each ...
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Extreme Fibonacci
There have been a billion iterations of Fibonacci challenges on this website, so lets spice things up with a Fibonacci challenge of a billion iterations!
Your challenge is to output the first 1000 ...
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Unfolding the Hexagony source code
Introduction
If you're not familiar with Hexagony, it's an esoteric language created by Martin Büttner. The thing is that this language accepts multiple forms for the program. The following programs ...
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Who's that Pokémon? [closed]
Input: an integer N between 1 and 151
Output: the Nth Pokemon.
Rules
You may use one data file.
You may not use any already made data decompression algorithms. This includes libraries and other ...
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There Was an Old Lady
Your goal is to write a program that prints the following poem exactly as it appears here:
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12 Days of Christmas Lyrics
I thought this would be a fun challenge for everyone and I'm curious to see the solutions people come up with.
Print the "12 Days Of Christmas" lyrics
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Golf me an ASCII Alphabet
Don't you find that reading simple text isn't appealing enough? Try our
...
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5 Favorite Letters
The challenge is actually extremely simple. Pick 5 distinct letters (you can just pick the 5 that allow you the shortest code if you like) and output them to the console. However, the twist is that ...
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This is my pillow
...will you help me immortalize it?
I've had this pillow a few years now, and apparently it's time to get rid of it. Can you please write a function or program, that I can bring with me and use to ...
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99 Bottles Of Beer [closed]
Recreate '99 bottles of beers on the wall'.
The desired output is this:
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Draw the South Korean flag
When I stumbled upon this question I remembered that I had also once seen precise rules for the construction of the South Korean flag. And this is quite a different construction.
Source: Wikipedia
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ASCII Art of the Day #1 - Double Knot
Write a full program or a function that takes a positive integer N as input via STDIN/command line/ARGV or function arguments and prints an ASCII double knot ...
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Print a string in as few distinct characters as possible
The task is simple: print The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog using as few distinct characters in your source code as possible.
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Golfing ASCII-art
Let's try to golf this piece of ascii-art representing a golfing man:
'\ . . |>18>>
\ . ' . |
O>> ...
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Print the American Flag!
Special Independence Day (USA) themed challenge for you today. You must write a program that prints this ascii-art representation of The American Flag.
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Let's draw the flag of Nepal
Nepal’s flag (Wikipedia, Numberphile) looks very different from any other. It also has specific drawing instructions (included in the Wikipedia article). I want you guys to make a program which will ...
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Spell out numbers in French
There was a challenge to convert a number to its numeral in English, but that was too straightforward. Given a number 0–100, your task is to output the corresponding numeral in French. The French ...
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Print the Greek alphabet!
Fairly obviously, you have to print the Greek alphabet. But I thought I'd make it slightly more interesting, so there's a twist: when your program is ran with an argument (anything), it should output ...
user53406
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An Old Irish Blessing
I don't know who coined these words, and I'm not Irish, but I give you an Irish blessing:
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A keyboard so real you can almost TASTE it
... Not that you would, would you? The task is simple, output the following text:
...
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It's my Birthday :D
Introduction
Last year was my birthday (really!) and sadly I had to organise my own party. Well, now you know, couldn't you at least make the cake?
Challenge
Given an integer ...
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Draw the national flag of Iceland
This year's UEFA Euro 2016 is over and besides a couple of negative headlines there has been a very positive surprise as well – the Iceland national football team. Let's draw their national flag.
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Recognise Stack Exchange Sites by Their Icon
After spending a while on Stack Exchange, I can recognise most sites in the Hot Network Questions by their little icon (which is also their favicon), but certainly not all of them. Let's write a ...
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Build me a brick wall!
Challenge
I need help building a brick wall! Throw together some code for me
using no input and produce the following output wall shown below:
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Help Trump build the wall!
Trump needs the wall constructed and you are going to do it! To most efficiently build his wall I have created a simple, repeatable pattern for you to use:
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Print 0 to 100 without 1-9 characters
Print integers 0 to 100 (inclusive) without using characters 123456789 in your code.
Separator of numbers can be comma or white space (by default <blank>, <...
user101144
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Print all ASCII alphanumeric characters without using them
Challenge
Print the following characters:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890
The catch is that you may not use any one of them in ...
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Convert 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 to "one", "two", "three", etc
Winner: professorfish's bash answer! An entire 9 bytes! Wow!
You may continue to submit your answer, however you can no longer win. Original post kept for posterity:
Your goal is to convert a whole ...
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Print X without X (robber's thread)
This is the robber's thread of a cops-and-robbers challenge. You can view the cop's thread here
A pretty common beginner style question is to print some string, but, there's a catch!, you need to do ...
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