Programming Puzzles & Code Golf newsletter

Top new questions this week:

Draw with your CPU

I have come across an article where students used network traffic to draw their university on the country's IPv6 graph. [image] Your goal is simple to tell, but hard to implement. Draw the text MAIL …

code-golf

asked by bebe 137 votes answered by squeamish ossifrage 90 votes

American Gothic in the palette of Mona Lisa: Rearrange the pixels

You are given two true color images, the Source and the Palette. They do not necessarily have the same dimensions but it is guaranteed that their areas are the same, i.e. they have the same number of …

popularity-contest image-processing

asked by Calvin's Hobbies 101 votes answered by Quincunx 51 votes

Has my milk expired?

Aww, man, this expiry date doesn't write the months with letters! I can't tell if it's expiring on March 10th or October 3rd... Wait, no, never mind, the year says 2012. (alley-oops half-used brick of …

code-golf date

asked by algorithmshark 70 votes answered by Ventero 12 votes

Good Versus Evil

Illustrated by Chris Rainbolt, my brother and a fresh graduate from Savannah College of Art and Design Introduction The angels and demons are fighting and, as usual, using earth as their …

king-of-the-hill pattern-matching

asked by Rusher 43 votes answered by m.buettner 16 votes

Write a Rectangular Program that Outputs the Number of Times it was Rotated

The title says it all. Your goal is to write a program that forms a w×h rectangle of characters that can be rotated and re-run to output the number of 90° Counter-Clockwise (CCW) rotations that have …

code-golf

asked by Calvin's Hobbies 29 votes answered by Quincunx 20 votes

Loop without 'looping'

A question similar to this has been asked a couple of years ago, but this one is even trickier. The challenge is simple. Write a program (in your language of choice) that repeatedly executes code …

popularity-contest restricted-source

asked by CailinP 23 votes answered by histocrat 65 votes

Golfing ASCII-art

Let's try to golf this piece of ascii-art representing a golfing man: '\ . . |>18>> \ . ' . | …

code-golf ascii-art kolmogorov-complexity

asked by xem 23 votes answered by Dennis 10 votes

Greatest hits from previous weeks:

Create a memory leak, without any fork bombs

Your task is to create a memory leak. This is a program that uses loads of memory, until the computer runs out and has to do some swapping to save itself from running out. The only way that the memory …

popularity-contest

asked by George H 43 votes answered by Andrew Medico 58 votes

Most creative way to reverse a positive integer

Provided an input as an unsigned integer: 13457 Your function/subroutine should return: 75431 Since this is a popularity contest, be creative. Constraints: You cannot use arrays. You cannot …

popularity-contest

asked by duci9y 39 votes answered by Jonathan Van Matre 42 votes

Can you answer these?

Compact coding of integer into bitstring

I want to compactly code positive integers x into bits, in a manner allowing decoding back into the original integers for a stateless decoder knowing the maximum value m of each x; it shall be …

code-golf

asked by fgrieu 5 votes

Probability to win a hand of poker (Texas hold 'em)

Challenge: In the last stage of a two players Texas hold 'em, given a two-card hand and five cards on table, determine your probability to win versus an opponent by the standard ranking of poker …

code-golf

asked by Cœur 3 votes