Stephen Turner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Keith C. Ivey wrote: > > So for each letter in the word, one number is included in the xor: > >797 for "a", 7101 for "e", 7105 for "i", 7111 for "o", 7117 for "u", > >7121 for "y", and 70 for anything else. > Bravo! I'm not at all surprised no-one else thought of this operation!
I looked at an ASCII chart for a while but inspiration didn't strike; bit operations aren't my strength. > > Andrew's choice of this hole was just right. Challenging enough to > >keep people away from their work and families until the last moment, > >and with multiple promising approaches. > Agreed. The number of completely different solutions is amazing and > impressive. One technique for the general golf game that I learned from Mark Suter, who I taunted mercilessly until he submitted an entry, was to set up a small sandbox to check in my programs and any updates to teven.pl; it was *very* helpful to be able to get back that 83-character solution after a series of hopeful modifications had destroyed it. The first step, though, was to write simple programs for both holes to serve as starting points; even.pl looked like this: even.pl ------- #!perl -n ($.%2)&&next; (length)%2||next; (y/a//%2)&&next; (y/e//%2)&&next; (y/i//%2)&&next; (y/o//%2)&&next; (y/u//%2)&&next; (y/y//%2)&&next; print 140 strokes! Goodness! But it did come in a lot of handy; being able to cut and paste expressions around to try different loops or quoting meant I could make progress (or decide I'd reached a dead end) very quickly, hence the revision control. Even for golf. I didn't expect that the two holes would provide inspiration for one another, but eventually, while working on even.pl, I tried to read the whole input into memory and preprocess it before printing it. Before I knew it, gs.pl had a -p0 option, and I was home and hosed. jason -- ||----|---|------------|--|-------|------|-----------|-#---|-|--|------|| | The way you tell your story http://linux.org.au/conf/ | | With no tears for yourself [EMAIL PROTECTED] | ||--|--------|--------------|----|-------------|------|---------|-----|-|
