Mirodir
Mirodir@discuss.tchncs.de
Joined
1 posts • 152 comments
Tangentially reminds me of Richard Feynman’s Cataclysm Sentence.
If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence was passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?
Sure. You have to solve it from inside out:
- not()…See comment below for this one, I was tricked
is a base function that negates what’s inside (turning True to False and vice versa) giving it no parameter returns “True” (because no parameter counts as False) - str(x) turns x into a string, in this case it turns the boolean True into the text string ‘True’
- min(x) returns the minimal element of an iterable. In this case the character ‘T’ because capital letters come before non-capital letters, otherwise it would return ‘e’ (I’m not entirely sure if it uses unicode, ascii or something else to compare characters, but usually capitals have a lower value than non-capitals and otherwise in alphabetical order ascending)
- ord(x) returns the unicode number of x, in this case turning ‘T’ into the integer 84
- range(x) creates an iterable from 0 to x (non-inclusive), in this case you can think of it as the list [0, 1, 2, …82, 83] (it’s technically an object of type range but details…)
- sum(x) sums up all elements of a list, summing all numbers between 0 and 84 (non-inclusive) is 3486
- chr(x) is the inverse of ord(x) and returns the character at position x, which, you guessed it, is ‘ඞ’ at position 3486.
The huge coincidental part is that ඞ lies at a position that can be reached by a cumulative sum of integers between 0 and a given integer. From there on it’s only a question of finding a way to feed that integer into chr(sum(range(x)))