Contest 45: 7 Card Draw

[exomo]

I solved mathschallenge #54 but I don't have the source any more.

I just finished the "read in the symbols" section, but I'm not satisfied yet. The results are too hard to handle which will result in many tokens I need.
When I looked at the mathschallenge problem again I noticed that ten was written as 'T' in the input file. But I guess you won't change the rules to make it easier to handle for me

[Beer Hunter]

what's a >?= operator do?

Something that takes more tokens in standard C++. :-)
Just disallow the use of compiler extensions; they're not in the spirit of the contest.

[Togra]

I could get down to 74 tokens just by converting my main loop into machine code, putting it in a string literal and executing it — but that would be cheating…

Well, I don't see an explicit rule against such a thing (no macro's maybe?)... But I agree it's cheating.

However, I'd really like to have consensus on these kind of approaches. I had an idea during coffee break yesterday (well, actually a friend inspired me). The idea theoretically allows any token-brevity problem to be solved in a few hundred tokens. So it gives a upper limit - whenever the programming task is too great, flip over to BF. It involves a lot more coding, but exploits the "string literals is one token"-fact maximally! Before sharing this idea with you (and abandoning it), take a guess...

[Wilderness Child]

Can someone please post the token counter program, the old links don't work anymore.


EDIT: Nevermind, found a link here: http://www.cyberkopia.net/gamer/modules ... d=6&lid=13

Does anyone have the source of this? An MS-DOS .exe is a bit difficult to run on a Linux system.

[Corsix]

When I looked at the mathschallenge problem again I noticed that ten was written as 'T' in the input file. But I guess you won't change the rules to make it easier to handle for me

That would make it too easy, it's alot harder when one card is three characters instead of two.

Edit: Part 1 of my checking program in done:

Code: Select all

if(HandMatches("ah qh kh 10h jh","ah kh qh jh 10h"))
    /* code */

if(HandMatches("10h 10c 7s 7c 5d","10h 10c 7s 7c $1","5c 5d"))
    /* code */

[Beer Hunter]

Well, I finally got some time to work on my code. My first, completely unoptimised attempt is 420 tokens. What on earth are you people doing wrong? ;-)

[Corsix]

Well, I finally got some time to work on my code. My first, completely unoptimised attempt is 420 tokens. What on earth are you people doing wrong?

What ??!?

Edit: In other news, I'm down to 1432
Edit2: 1399

[Beer Hunter]

Well, clearly the problem is that you special-cased the royal flush, which already beats every other hand even without special casing. ;-)
By the way, I believe the punctuation you're looking for is '‽'. ;-)

[Corsix]

Yes, I did spot and fix that.

Code: Select all

==Overall:==
C45.cpp 1318
==Breakdown:==
Includes 14
Declarations 28
Helper: PutInCardSuits 84
Generic Processing 111
  Royal Flush 3
  Straight Flush 144
  Four of a Kind 113
  Full House 75
  Flush 121
  Straight 93
  Three of a Kind 103
  Two Pairs 121
  One Pair 103
  High Card 74
Input 89
Output 35

... 1268

[Beer Hunter]

Code: Select all

includes: 24
globals: 3
function to examine a group of seven cards: 251
main(): 113

(total: 391)

The third thing, the function that examines seven cards, takes a pointer to an array of strings in the same format as in the input file. It rearranges the array elements so that the best group of five cards is at the beginning, and then returns an incomprehensible number. I'd like to tell you how many tokens are spent on each rule, but it's much too hard to tell.

[Togra]

No please, you're already telling too much ! Now I'm afraid my own creativity will be suppressed by the need to reconstruct your method...

[Corsix]

I've got an idea of how to get a very low token count without a machine code string literal.
I just have to wait for my computer to look at 311,875,200 computations...

[Darryl]

Not that I am condoning it for this contest, but out of curiosity, how to you execute machine code from a string literal?

[Corsix]

[syntax="cpp"]char sASM[] = "\x8B\x45\x08\xC7\x00\x2A\x00\x00\x00\xC3";

void ExecuteStringAsm(char* sAsm, ...)
{
__asm call dword ptr [sAsm]
}
[/syntax]

[Darryl]

Ok I rewrote mine from scratch with a new strategy and I am at 728 for my new first draft with plenty of fat to cut.

.. 758

There was a problem differentiating 2-6 vs A-5 straights) The whole Ace hi-lo thing has been my most difficult problem I think

736 - back on track

includes 19
globals 41
Rank Hands 419
main 5
input 20
Hand Sorting/comparison 161
Output + closing brace 29

..694
..662 off to bed