hacker.org

This was pretty fun! I had most difficulty getting the edges in place before filling in the rest. By the time I'd tweaked the checks for shape and color enough to get the edges right, the program could fill in the rest on its own. I had to correct a wrong pick twice, after that it was smooth sailing...

My math is weak, so I did this like a true graphics hacker. I actually think this was a relatively easy challenge -- I think messing around with huge numbers and complicated mathematics is way harder than simply doing some intuitive/basic checks on a bunch of pixels... Took the main image, blew it u...

I'm also writing a HVM compiler that turns a C-like script language (which I call PreHVM) into a working HVM program. Kinda like witschi, only I went overboard: I made it track 'variables' on the stack, evaluate complex expressions with almost all operators C uses, with if/elseif/else and while stru...

Actually the first HVM challenge that I feel I got too much bloat on.. Fun one though!
00^<1v0^1+2v0^2v0^<2v:83*?0^92+:2?6gdd1+1c1+1v93+c<p

I just solved it with a little PHP script: <?php $im = imagecreatefrompng('http://www.hacker.org/challenge/misc/stars.php'); ?> That's what I tried at first, but how did you manage to keep your hacker.org session going for that? I had to get the file's contents through fopen, just so I could send m...

00<6?1+0^2cp

Note: I think it's awesome to read all the different ways people do this -- I think it's an amazing thing that such a short program in such a terse language can create this beautiful diversity. :]

1814 ..

gandhi wrote: Iḿ not sure about the gliders.

Do they "travel in space" forever?

Why wouldn't they? If a certain pattern going through the same patterns over and over again never meets anything, what could possibly change its behavior?

I used a combination of a local PHP proxy page and a javascript/iframe combination (to avoid the CSS block for javascript). This overcomplicates some things, while keeping others simple (I guess it's just a weird kind of selective laziness). I ended up using a database to store the frequency of (typ...

Fun fact: I 'solved' this one by randomly replying yes/no (after I found out it was a single static test), and I got it on the second try. Heh. Could've easily done it with a text file 'memory' of course, but meh. Would've been more fun if there would've been some trick to it, like spaces added, or ...

I'm okay with this challenge. It requires some debugging if you approach it the easy way. It's not that hard to work around. This is not am accredited web development course, it's a hacker challenge. :]

[edit: removed some stuff after I discovered this was not the 'solved' thread]

But fragman, all the fun is in making a script for the best 'power play'. :]

It was pretty funny. I just saw the yesses, tried to 'yes' and 'no', and that was that.
After that, it was super easy to find out how to get 'no' from the actual content, but I'll bet it would've taken a bit longer if I didn't know what to try and get out of it exactly.. :]

Fun challenge. Meticulous and systematic approach is advisable.
The only thing that I disliked were the unnecessary distracting 'unused bits'. If they were added to make it harder to solve, I'd have much preferred a tougher consistent 'scheme' instead!

Don't agree with fragman. When you really find out what to do, it's hard to miss. If you don't feel it click mentally, you probably still don't know what to look for. To everyone searching endlessly for game results, statistics, stock index values, etc... you're wasting your time. You have to think ...