Re: The golf course looks great, my swing feels good, I like my chances (Part V)

My very first solution, also around 140 strokes, used trigonometry.

I'm a different animal from Andrew, I think, and I prefer solutions that make some sense, rather than a magic formula, or unpacking a bizarre string :)

Here's a speeded up version of my whittling!

$c[5-int(5.2*cos($a=$_*.524))][8+int(8.2*sin($a))]

$c[5-int 5.2*cos$_*.52][8+int 8.2*sin$_*.524]

$c[5-int 5.2*cos$_*.52][8+7.8*sin$_*.523]

$c[5-int 5.2*cos($_*=.523)][8+7.8*sin]

$c[5.61-4.7*cos($_*=.523)][8+7.8*sin]

$c[5.5-4.7*cos($_*=.523)][8+7.8*sin]

$c[$_*=.523,5.5-4.7*cos][8+7.8*sin]

$c[$_*=.52,5.5-4.7*cos][8+7.4*sin]
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The first solution has ints on both indicies, uses .524 (which I think is a closer approximation of the hours to radians factor than .52), brackets around everthing - generally a mess.

I was relatively quickly able to get rid of most of the bracketing, eventually got rid of one int, (then much later the other!), and trimmed the numbers to fit.

I think the best bit of golfing was to change 5.5-4.7*cos($_*=.523) to $_*=.523,5.5-4.7*cos. It was one of those "I don't think this will work but I may as well try it" moments! Hurrah!

There are quite a large range of numbers that produce the correct pattern, but only a few with the least number of decimals. I think this is fairly optimal. I'm going to assume(!!) that Andrew has tried and failed to better this.

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Re^2: The golf course looks great, my swing feels good, I like my chances (Part V) by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on Dec 09, 2009 at 19:35 UTC
I'm going to assume(!!) that Andrew has tried and failed to better this. I didn't bother because I assumed you'd already written a program to search for the shortest possible solution. :)	[reply]
Re^2: The golf course looks great, my swing feels good, I like my chances (Part V) by Jasper (Chaplain) on Dec 11, 2009 at 15:39 UTC
I should probably also note here that my original 'equation' used `$_ \|\| $"` in the final print. So that first formula x and y are the actual coordinates of the clock indicies. Later, when I moved to `print "@$_"`, I had to fiddle the numbers a bit to generate the numbers above, because there is slightly different spacing caused by the undefs (one extra space, if I'm thinking correctly on this very hung over afternoon). These aren't then the x and y coordinates, but the print sorts all that out. Anyway, just an explanation in case any eagle-eyed readers wondered what was going on there...	[reply] [d/l] [select]