[LRUG] ShRUG Golf update

[Andrew McDonough]

Thanks James.  I'm glad that ShRUG enjoyed it.  We were a bit short on
time at LRUG, with less than an hour available for coding.  Four teams
completed the course, and our winner was Tomasz Wegrzanowsk (@t_a_w),
who was working on his own, and managed 704 characters
(http://j.mp/lbcXV2).  Second place was @zuppr, @jamiemill @morticed
and @aanand who came a close second in with 843 chars
http://j.mp/mBjfJU, third place was  @danlucraft, @nfelger, Jordi,
Dan, Tony, Steve and Keith who completed the course in 883 chars
http://j.mp/jHhbWU and finally one other anonymous team completed the
course with 1208 characters (if this was you, please let us know who
you are).  The winner, Tomasz (http://j.mp/lSsmJd), was presented with
a trophy (http://j.mp/iRFwGP) and the second placed team got medals.
There are still four medals left, which I will award at the next LRUG
to the four people who produce the best solutions (not necessarily the
shortest ones), so there's still something to play for if you didn't
come along on the evening.

There appears to have been a lot of work done since to get the
character counts down even further, in particular from Paul Battley
with some help from Tom Stuart.  Their commit log is worth looking
through:

https://github.com/threedaymonk/rubygolf/commits/master

They got the solution down to 654 characters, before realising they
could exploit my "whitespace isn't counted" rule to encode their
solution in spaces and newlines, and then simply decode and exec.
This brought the solution down to 37 characters.  He gets one of the
four medals.  Genius:

https://github.com/threedaymonk/rubygolf/blob/master/lib/golf.rb

I have put the introductory presentation I made up on heroku:

http://rubygolf-presentation.heroku.com

Skills Matter have published some photos of the evening:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/skillsmatter/5704350908/in/set-72157626683669388/

I will follow up later with some analysis of the solutions and some of
the tricks and techniques used, but for now, you can look through the
various solutions that were submitted:

https://github.com/andrewmcdonough/rubygolf/network

Congratulations to ShRUG - you guys did really well completing the
course with so few characters.

Andrew

---
Andrew McDonough
CTO, Tribesports
http://tribesports.com


On 10 May 2011 13:59, James Almond <james at jamesalmond.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> As promised, an update on ShRUG's progress with the Ruby Golf night we ran
> in parallel with LRUG.
> Firstly, I managed to fork the repository before the 7th hole was added and
> nobody noticed until a fair amount of time into the evening so we completed
> the course without it. We also worked with a slightly lighter and RSpec
> 2 compatible runner, but all specs and counting mechanisms stayed the same.
> Everyone had 1.9.2 installed and favoured it, so we went with that over
> 1.8.7. I think we were still pretty close to what you were running. We had
> around 5 pairs of 2.
> Our lowest team effort on the night was 592 (with hole 7
> missing): https://github.com/ianwhite/rubygolf/blob/master/lib/golf.rb
> A group discussion and edit took the count down to
> 522: https://github.com/shruggers/rubygolf/blob/ecd0b312bfb9707b6debfc01062eab5e39d5f95a/lib/golf.rb
> A bit of post-ShRUG editing and adding hole 7 our final team count was
> 604: https://github.com/shruggers/rubygolf/blob/master/lib/golf.rb
> The discussion and collating of the results at the end was good fun and also
> made it one of the latest running ShRUG meetings I can remember.
> Everyone had a great evening, and learnt something new. Thanks to Andrew
> (and anybody else who contributed) for the holes, much appreciated! The
> #rubygolf radio silence from Sheffield was because everyone was too busy
> attempting the holes, sorry about that.
> James
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lists.lrug.org
> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>
>