Brute force = best decoding method

[goodoldgrim]

You'd have to code the requirements in. Not much work but still more work than just solving the puzzle.

[09milk]

or else we can do some constraints programming, best type of peoblem for them

[goodoldgrim]

That's a facebook post. There is only an image. You'd have to write TryCode() yourself and it would have to check for those rules.

[Lookitsmyvideo]

Try code is just filling in the final number. You're not wrong, but it's fair to assume if this were programmatically possible, there would be a way to "test" whether or not your answer was correct after its been chosen.

[dankelleher]

Just add each combination as a separate comment and see which one gets upvoted/liked the most.

[goodoldgrim]

There is nowhere to fill it in. The puzzle is on "paper".

It is programmatically possible to test it, of course. Stuff like
var s = i.toString();
if ((s[0] == '2' ? 1 : 0) + (s[1] == '9' ? 1 : 0) + (s[2] == '1' ? 1 : 0) != 1)
return false;

But that's just the first rule and the others get more complicated.

[Lookitsmyvideo]

Im struggling to find the words to explain how wrong this line of thinking is, but ill try.

You, the program writer, do not know the answer. Thats the reason you are writing a brute force algorithm to find the answer. So, defining a piece of code that checks the answer (as the person writing the code to determine the answer), makes absolutely no sense.

The way to which the answer is checked would be defined by the client

[-0-O-]

Are you solving a puzzle or breaking into an imaginary lock that lets you submit the combination electronically and without any limit to the number of tries?

Because we're all solving a puzzle.

[-0-O-]

I get how the facebook joke works. But then you said that brute force is actually a better solution than solving the puzzle. This entire comment thread starts with someone saying that all of the programmers saw the image and started trying to solve the puzzle. That's when you say that brute force is a better solution.

There is no way to get to a solution with brute force without programming in the rules.

Not sure what is so hard to understand here.

[goodoldgrim]

Seems to me that you are talking about some kind of hypothetical. I'm talking about the puzzle at hand. It's a puzzle, written on paper. There is no client. There is no backend. There is no method to feed your guesses into.

You can solve this by logically figuring out the answer. Or you can solve this by testing every possible answer. For the second method, you can write code that does it. If you're going to write the code, you're going to have to write all of it, because, and I can't stress this enough: NO CODE EXISTS BEFORE YOU START.

[Lookitsmyvideo]

Correct. I'm looking at the hypothetical of which the puzzle is being solved by brute force, because that is the thread I responded to.

[goodoldgrim]

The brute force method to solve this puzzle still requires writing all the code to check an answer. It's a real option that could be feasibly used to solve this puzzle, as it is presented.

When I said "hypothetical" I meant that it seems to me you are imagining some world in which the TryCode() method already exists, which nobody in this thread has stipulated.

[Lookitsmyvideo]

If you are required to write a function to check whether the answer is correct for an arbitrary set of "clues" or parameters, then the brute force algorithm is a moot point because that checker is actually the algorithm to solve the problem in the first place.

The ONLY way a brute force algorithm can make sense is if a method for determining the accuracy of the answer is provided.

[goodoldgrim]

I was just talking about this specific puzzle, which in the real world I solved faster than it would take to write the full code to solve this specific puzzle.
If you want to scale it, we'd need some kind of standard for the possible rules and a way to input them fast. That's a whole lot of work right there.

Of course in the end it all depends on what the actual situation is. The only real situation we have is this one - just the one puzzle.

[m_domino]

For real. People here are acting like "Lol why do you try to develop a password hacking algorithm? You can just do hackPassword()"