On Sun, 9 Jun 2002, Ton Hospel wrote: > In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, > "Sean O'Rourke" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > From the rules: "A word contains at least one alphanumeric character > > (letter or digit), and optionally some punctuation (. , ; : ' " ( ) & /). > > Note: This means that punctuation characters can never occur alone. But > > except for the period, which must end a sentence, punctuation can occur > > anywhere in a word." > > > > I took this to mean "punctuation, including '.', can occur within a word, > > but since '.' can end a sentence, only non-'.' punctuation can end a word. > > This seems like a more careful reading which, if universally followed, > > would have resulted in a lot more solutions with /\S*\w\S*/ in them. But > > the refs, in writing the tests, either did not test this corner case, or > > interpreted the rule the other way. > > > > ....the period, which must end a sentence... > > So periods end a sentence. if there is a period in the middle of a word, > it's now two words, one on the end of the last sentence, and one at > the beginning of the next. > > How else do you decide where a sentence ends in fact ? whitespace/newlines > were optional between sentences.
I take them to be required: "A paragraph consists of one or more sentences, separated by sequences of whitespace characters (spaces and/or at most one newline)," and "a sentence consists of one or more words, separated by sequences of whitespace characters, where the last one ends in a period." Combined with the above rule, I take this to mean that end-of-sentence is "/\.(\s+|\z)/". Unfortunately, while neither of us appears to have any doubts about the rules, we don't quite agree... > Nope, if dots in the middle were allowed, the whole -056 concept would have > broken down. You're right here -- I was on crack. Maybe this could be next month's challenge ;). > > hour, what should have been done? A test suite is unambiguous -- you > > either pass it or you don't. > > > > Nah, that would be unfair. > [potential score-shaving measures] I would say that in these cases either (1) the tricks would clearly violate the rules, and the refs would therefore notice them, or (2) the tricks would exploit corner-cases the refs hadn't thought of, in which case it's not necessarily clear what the rules intended in the first place. > A purely testcase based approach would also make challenges with random > numbers like in the ircnet golf almost impossible. It invalidates > the "either you pass or you don't". How did you automatically test the entries? The score program's no longer on the web. > Also have look at the winner of the lapm 1 challenge. It will > succesfully finish the testcase, but will not finish until long after > the sun becomes a white dwarf. Reject or not ? If it can't finish the test case, I think either it should be rejected, or the golfer should argue that the tests be changed. > I don't really think there is a "simple enough that the intent is clear" > in general. I think Kolakoski and Cantor both qualified here, as will most other math-derived holes. Not that I want to restrict our hole selection to just math. In some sense, every spec will be ambiguous, but clearly magic number's ambiguity is nothing like interlinear's. /s
