New BrainFuck Problem Proposal
Back to General discussions forum
Hello, I'm hoping this is the right place to announce that I have a proposal for a new problem involving BrainFuck, involving a concept that hasn't been explored yet in the existing BF puzzles so far on this site.
I have the prompt written, along with a generator to create "random" Input Strings and corresponding Answer Strings, and of course working BF code that can process all strings in under 10^6 cycles.
I don't want to give too much information away, so if I could somehow contact an admin directly? Looking at other forum posts it's a little unclear to me how this was securely communicated in the past, to avoid making all the secrets of the problem public!
Hi! my email is actually somewhere on the site but it is not quite easy to find it :)
I set it for now in a yellow notification for you, hopefully you'll see it!
I've sent an email with the proposal to Rodion and he did respond last week saying he needed to review it. I imagine he might be busy at the moment with real life :)
I actually sent two problem proposals along, both requiring one new concept each not required to solve the existing problems. So maybe it may take twice the time to process...
Dear Friends, I'm very sorry for such a long delay - but now problem is prepared and I sent it to Kevin (moxieman) to review. You all also can test it meanwhile. Here is a link.
Honestly I was a bit reluctant about using BF for "general problem" as it seems a bit tedious work - but on the other hand if there are some of us who finds it funny, let it be!
I confess I myself had difficulty recollecting BF and how it works in this site - and a bit horrified by the cases proposed by the task - which, along with some domestic issues, caused such a long delay. Hopefully "late" is not as bad as "never".
I think this is banned by the Geneva Convention as a particularly cruel form of torture. :)
I think we'll try to keep from adding more of this style, reserving BF space for problems exercising some special tricks and manipulations. However this could be a motivation to try producing some higher-level language interpreter which compiles down to BF!
Kevin,
Many thanks for this interesting problem. When I first read the problem description, my immediate reaction was "Aaaah!" (very much the same as Mathias' thoughts). However, most people using this site will work through the sequence of BF problems in order. Doing this will build up their skill set with BF. I think that your problem is a very fitting challenge to place at the end of the sequence. Unfortunately, in my own case, it is so long since I last looked at BF that I had forgotten everything of relevance. I had to start from scratch, working out once more how to do the simple things, before I could even contemplate the more demanding aspects. If I had realised at the outset, just how messy the code was going to be, I would have written a Python program to generate the BF code (which I see has already been suggested by Rodion).
I agree with Rodion that there is no point in producing more problems similar to this one, unless they explore some new concept within BF.
Having now completed the problem, there is a definite sense of relief but also one of satisfaction. It is really good to see another person keen to contribute problems. Best wishes for your progression up the rankings.
Hello Clive,
I'm glad you enjoyed it! My original idea was that the existing BF problems often require checking if a positive integer A == 0, but none yet required checking comparison between two given positive integers, A < B. I crafted the triangle narrative around that to make it a little more interesting, but now I see that the scale of the problem may have overshadowed the original A < B idea a bit... oops!
I noticed also that the common strategies used for A < B when A, B ∈ ℕ would break and need to be modified if instead A, B ∈ ℤ, and that idea is also not required in any of the existing BF problems either. But probably these ideas are not quite "novel" or "interesting" enough to warrant an entire problem crafted around them... As Rodion mentioned, we're starting to near "compiler to BF" territory! Maybe that would be best left as personal excercise for anybody who is looking for more torture :D