Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

RegEx Crossword

jimbly.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 160 posts

Re: RegEx Crossword

#111

Post by afranchuk »

reificator wrote: post #25
afranchuk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just completed it, and can say with certainty that it is solvable by only taking into consideration two constraints at any given time, with the exception of 3 at just one point early on (and they were the easier constraints in the puzzle). That being said, the nature of regex means you kind of need to jump around as far as which constraints you combine.

I don't doubt that, and I don't doubt it's a good puzzle, especially if you're already familiar with the format. But since this is my first introduction to this kind of puzzle, I need some anchor points at the beginning so I feel like I have something to work off of. I'm not even asking for a whole row, just an easier set of known chars at the start of the round so I have a hint at which of the 39 constraints I shoul…

Yeah I definitely get that. I've never done a puzzle of this type before, but I have done a hell of a lot of logic puzzles (thanks to the Simon Tatham collection among others) so I was able to figure out a good attack vector. I agree, it wasn't easy to find where to start nor where to make progress in the beginning. Lots of data to ingest.

Re: RegEx Crossword

#112

Post by schoen »

frob wrote: post #102
schoen wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the original MIT Mystery Hunt page (and solution). It was part of a puzzle hunt. (I was one of the people who successfully solved it on my team during that very event back in 2013...) See this comment for the link to the original, including the author's name and the puzzle in context with its official solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26439598 (I wish that other comment would get upvoted to the t…

Hah! I was beginning to suspect there existed some pattern or answer in the result and was looking for an answer. The better part of 2 decades of mystery hunt has conditioned me. I see a four-letter snack in there that jumps out as a possible solution. Should we call hq?

I'm afraid HQ closed around 8 years and 56 days ago. :-)

Re: RegEx Crossword

#115

Post by justusthane »

rav wrote: post #47
ryangittins wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Some of them can be simplified quite a bit, which leads to a lot of clutter. For instance, (XHH|[^XH])* is equivalent to just .* EDIT: It looks like I read the regex wrong. I guess I need to do the puzzle after all!

I found other patterns that I thought were unsimplified, but (spoiler alert) in the end it turned out that all of the seemingly-unnecessary details were important for the solution! E.g. [^C]*[^R]* LOOKS unsimplified, but it actually means that if the string contains an R, the preceding characters CANNOT be C.

Or if the string contains a C, a subsequent character can't be an R?

Doesn't it really just mean a string can't contain a C followed by an R?

Re: RegEx Crossword

#116

Post by Jimbly »

ehsankia wrote: post #96
ehsankia wrote: post #20

Small feature request for this implementation: Highlight/bold the three impacted regex when selecting a given hexagon, trying to trace it manually by eye is a bit of a pain. (I guess I could PR on github when I get some time later today)

https://github.com/Jimbly/regex-crossword/pull/10

Merged, thanks!

Re: RegEx Crossword

#117

Post by lkbm »

schoen wrote: post #100
mypalmike wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spent a similar amount of time... Ended up with a "solution" that breaks 1 constraint. Must have erred somewhere, but backtracking is only leading to other 1-broken constraint outcomes. Sigh.

Official solution from the original author: https://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/2013/coinheist.com/rubik/a_re...

Oooh, I was stuck because I was insisting on `.(1)(2)(3)(4)\4\3\2\1.` having the middle eight characters mirror each other, which results in a clear contradiction with a few of the crosses.

Thanks for posting the answers. I think I'm done working on it for now, but that one was really bothering me.

Re: RegEx Crossword

#118

Post by acdw »

I thought this would be a true crossword -- i.e., it'd have /words/ to solve for ... :/

Really neat puzzle though!

Post reply on HN