amirali1374's blog

Unknown Language Round #3
By amirali1374, 13 years ago, In English

Hi all!
Unknown Language Round #3 is going to take place on 30th of July. (This very Saturday -- Friday for some parts of the world)
This is the third contest of its type. The rules are easy (and fun):

  1.     Scoring is similar to that of ACM-ICPC.
  2.     The contest is not rated.
  3.     You can submit your code using only one language. This language is a secret and will be announced only when the contest begins! (We'll expect lots of coding bugs and syntax mistakes!)


This is the 100th contest on Codeforces. Congratulations to Mike Mirzayanov for developing a system that grows so fast!

There will be 10 problems overall. The tasks concentrate mainly on coding abilities rather than problem-solving and algorithmic techniques. Tasks are made by Mike Mirzayanov, Kiana Gholampoor, Soroush Farrokhnia , Amir Goharshady and Me (Amirali Mohammadzade).

We're grateful to Artem Rakhov for helping us to prepare the tasks, Maria Belova for translation, Zahra Rohanifar for testing one of the tasks and Hossein Boomari for teaching us to code!

The contest is dedicated to Mike Mirzayanov and Artem Rakhov for their great job at Codeforces and for helping us all improve our coding abilities.

UPD: The contest is over.Only 6 people solved problem J. Congratulations to Peter50216 from Taiwan for winning the contest and to the following 5 people for solving all the taks:

Password-protected archive is available for pre-download. It contains some files in the language of today's contest. You can download it right now, and your password will be published along with the announcement of the language.

The mysterious Unknown language for today's contest is "Pike". Pike was designed by Fredrik Hubinette at Linkoping University, Sweden, in 1994. Having a C-like syntax, Pike is just another "curly-brackets" language. Pike can be used to write small and simple scripts, and also for very large programs. Pike's advanced data types. If you're a fan of GNU-Emacs, then today's contest is your heaven! Emacs has a Pike-Highlighter!

Here's a simple Pike code: 

int main() {<br>string s=Stdio.stdin->gets();<br>write(s);<br>return 0;<br>}

You can get Pike at its homepage: http://pike.ida.liu.se/. You may also take a look at http://www.gotpike.org/. Find out more about the language by searching in the net.

You may use "Custom Test" tab in the contest interface to run Pike files. Also you may use http://ideone.com/ or install it locally. You may try to install Pike package if you are using *nix OS.

Please note that the Pike input reading on Windows is not working properly due to lack of special treatment of the character \r. Therefore, all input files to the solutions on Pike are processed to remove the character \r.

Pack password is 18fbfca3e186dcf9f6faf08d0a3b5681.

Good Luck and Have fun.


Announcement of Unknown Language Round 3
  • Vote: I like it
  • +60
  • Vote: I do not like it

Comments Comments (57)
| Write comment?
13 years ago, # |
← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +10 Vote: I do not like it

double post
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it -6 Vote: I do not like it
I want language brainfuck)))
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  • 13 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it -9 Vote: I do not like it
    HQ9+ is better :)
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    • 13 years ago, # ^ |
        Vote: I like it +9 Vote: I do not like it
      Certainly not HQ9+ - it has less than 10 problems solvable in it :-)
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +6 Vote: I do not like it
The invitational letter (Russian edition) states that the contest starts at 11:00 MSD. However, the timeanndate.com link itself gives 10:00 MSD. The starting time on the site is also 10:00 MSD.

What is the right starting time?
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  • 13 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +8 Vote: I do not like it
    Sorry, 10:00. It's my fault.
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    • 13 years ago, # ^ |
        Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it
      I just notice that the starting time of round 79 and 80 are unusual. Is there a reason? It had turned out that 7:00 PM MSD is nice for most of the participants(if not the best, look at the huge number of participants from the past contests). So why change?
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      • 13 years ago, # ^ |
          Vote: I like it +1 Vote: I do not like it
        is nice for most of the participants

        but not for all.
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +16 Vote: I do not like it
It's the second ULR with Iranian author!
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it
I have an exotic variant: Prolog or Lisp =))
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  • 13 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +9 Vote: I do not like it
    Lisp is not so exotic ;)
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  • 13 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it
    I'm also thinking of a Lisp variant (maybe, Scheme) for some reason.
    Or maybe some ML-family language, like OCaml.
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    • 13 years ago, # ^ |
        Vote: I like it +13 Vote: I do not like it
      As for me, both of them are not so "desired-to-be-unknown" anymore.
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +11 Vote: I do not like it
An Unknown Language Round should be unknown for almost everyone ,In that case everyone will enjoy it very much....
Best of Luck Everyone...
Hope all of us will make our-self comfortable for a new language and learn something new ......:D
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +5 Vote: I do not like it
the secret lang should be completely a surprise for everyone .
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +5 Vote: I do not like it
When will the language be known? 10 minutes before start or just before start?
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13 years ago, # |
← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +1 Vote: I do not like it

It's my first ULR, so I don't know how it's going...

Does the archive contain compiler of interpreter of the language? If yes, then what OS is it for? If no, would it be possible to get it from somewhere?

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  • 13 years ago, # ^ |
    ← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +1 Vote: I do not like it

    Yes, It does.
    It contains compiler/interpreter for Win32 and Linux.
    You may also use the "custom test" feature to test your codes, but there is no guarantee that it works if many people are using it.
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  • 13 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +5 Vote: I do not like it
    With probability about 90% it would be at ideone.com, where you can compile/run you code
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it
custom test crashed?
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +16 Vote: I do not like it
I didn't like pike at all.
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  • 13 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +37 Vote: I do not like it
    I completely agree. In my opinion, it's too similar to c++. So basically the only thing you had to do is to figure out how to read data (that turned out to be quite similar to C as well). After that it was just solving trivial problems in a familiar language.

    Even though it's my first ULR, for future rounds I'd prefer languages with much weirder syntax (something like APL :) ) or non-imperative paradigm (maybe something functional). In that case participants would have to learn something more than just another few library functions.
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    • 13 years ago, # ^ |
      ← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +24 Vote: I do not like it

      Probably for some of newbie coders it was useful to read documentation and figure out the neccessary library functions.It's one of the skills each programmer should master.  Btw,the documentation is organized quite well:)

      But , i think the round was quite boring for experienced coders.

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  • 13 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +31 Vote: I do not like it
    Actually, it is pretty nice. I've spent the first hour reading manuals and have found a bunch of interesting things. Although it's syntax look like C++ and it supports imperative paradigm (and these facts made it easier to catch up), it differs quite a lot from C++.

    Pike has both dynamic and static typing, functions are first class citizens (lambdas are there), it has a garbage collector, it is easier to perform various operations over containers and etc. Many actions can be performed easier, with less code, but, as I suppose, most contestants (including me) were using just a C++-simillar approach and style.

    I'm just implying that, maybe, if the one will spend a bit more time on reading about pike (instead of a rush at the contest), you may like it at least a little bit.
    → Reply
    • 13 years ago, # ^ |
        Vote: I like it +26 Vote: I do not like it
      Just an interesting fact:
      If the one will read manuall carefully, he may notice that `int` type is, by default, expanded to the bignum type in case of an overflow. So, the solution for problem C should look something like:

      1. #!/usr/bin/env pike

      3. int main ()
      4. {
      5.     int a, b;

      7.     a = (int) Stdio.stdin.gets ();
      8.     b = (int) Stdio.stdin.gets ();
      9.     write ((string) (a + b));


      12.     return 0;
      13. }

      Whereas, many people have implemented long summation by hand.
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      • 13 years ago, # ^ |
          Vote: I like it -14 Vote: I do not like it
        It's faster to implement addition of big numbers than read the manual :)
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +4 Vote: I do not like it
Nice round, thanks to authors!
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it
Problem F was too hard for me during the contest, I spent a lot of time (about 30 min), write a lot of stupid code - and didn't solved it... But really it's very easy... FAIL.
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it

This version of Pike can't process this code:

    float f;   sscanf(s,"%d",f);

but it works on http://ideone.com/. It's strange that the ideone.com has older version of language.

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  • 13 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it
    you need to read :
    float f; sscanf(s,"%f",f);

    → Reply
  • 13 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it
    I had the same problem; I asked this question during the contest and got the answer.
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13 years ago, # |
← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +12 Vote: I do not like it

Thanks to the authors for their effort (one day I MUST force myself to write a ULR myself), but the round itself was a disaster for me. First 1.5 hours I could barely load the problem descriptions, and at all times I couldn't submit - the system just rejected my files ("please select a file") or the page didn't load at all.
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it -8 Vote: I do not like it
hey mike , how many people participated in total for "unknown round" ?

Besides this was really fun .
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +8 Vote: I do not like it
Good manual I used: http://doc.dvgu.ru/devel/pike/tutorial_onepage.html
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +9 Vote: I do not like it
sudo apt-get install pike7.8
from this perspective linux users have had a huge advantage :) I had my machine set up in two minutes after contest started.

Thanks for the contest. I love such kind of contests (short period of time, lots of reasonably easy problems). Also, I loved to learn a new language, which is similar to the languages I know, though have a very nice functional influence. However, some more obscure language would be also fun :)

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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it
یاد این تیتراژ آخر فیلما افتادم ... نمیدونم چرا؟!؟‌‌  ;) :P
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it
How can I see other coders submission for this round?
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  • 13 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it
    In front of the problem , number of people who solved it is written (e.g. x10). click on it and in the following page click on any submission ID to see the code.
    → Reply
13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it
In the 2nd question,how to accept the input as it is separated by commas..Plz help
Thanx in advance
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  • 13 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it
    I did it like this:
            array a     = Stdio.stdin->gets()/",";
                for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
                    sscanf    (a[i], "%d", a[i]);
    → Reply
13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +1 Vote: I do not like it
I'm trying to submit my solutions but get "Judgment failed" error each time. Is this the server-side problem?
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it
I am also having the "Judgment failed" problem
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it
me too, receive "Judgment failed" after submit, i think it is due to the system's problem, could admin help to solve this problem? Or the system will not support the language after the contest?
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it
me too! I also received "Judgement Failed". Do admins notice the issue?
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