[paulsecwhatt]

I absolutely believe Mike should have paid Patrick.

On the simple premise that since Mike was hosting a bet that he KNEW was impossible (i.e. under no circumstance, ever, would he have to pay the 5000$), then literally the only point of the game is to find any loopholes. Otherwise it's just Mike preying on unsuspecting victims.

If you design an impossible game, the only possible thing for anyone to do is to break it. If you then complain that THAT is cheating, you're a pedantic idiot - one of those annoying kids in middle school who loses a bet and then tries every possible way to weasel himself out.

To add fuel to the fire, his obnoxious replies such as "I tried running the first two files and it didn't work", make my blood boil, as it's a clear attempt to try and belittle the contestant.

[brownbat]

> If you design an impossible game, the only possible thing for anyone to do is to break it. If you then complain that THAT is cheating, you're a pedantic idiot

I feel the same way when casinos bust card counters. You use math to take money from suckers. When other people use your rules and better math to take money from you, that's suddenly deeply immoral.

[titanomachy]

I don't think anyone feels that card-counting is deeply immoral. It's more like, "we lose money when people do this, so we will do everything in our power to prevent it."

[emn13]

Mike's responses could have been better, but in the correspondence I see no guarantee that the files will be presented in order, or with the same file names, or in an otherwise empty directory.

That sounds close to cheating, but I think it's exactly in the spirit of both the original challenge by Mike and the response by Patrick. After all, the original challenge didn't mention multiple files (so it's not surprising that this limitation isn't mentioned), and the subsequent alteration to the rules was initiated by Patrick, who intentionally tried to inject a loophole, but failed to specify the need to keep the files in order. His rules; he should have to live by them.

Also, I suspect that if Patrick had mentioned the need to leave the file names unaltered or in order, there's a good chance that Mike would have smelled a rat. After all, it is precisely in that side-channel where the information gain is to be had.

[DougBTX]

The "compressed" files includes a header file which records the original file name and the number of parts which make up the compressed file, so it doesn't depend on directory listing to re-combine the parts.

[emn13]

Yes, it does. It records the original file name, not the name of the parts, and it needs the names+metadata of those parts (specifically in this case their order) to reconstruct the original file.

[DougBTX]

Here's the script:

    #!/bin/sh
    i=0
    f=`head -1 $1`
    n=`tail -1 $1`
    rm -f $f
    while [ $i != $n ]; do
        cat $1.$i >> $f
        i=`expr $i + 1`
        if [ $i != $n ]; then printf "5" >> $f; fi
    done

The iteration is done with a while loop based on metatdata from the "compressed" file (the number of parts, $n) and the name of the archive ($1). The order of the parts is determined by incrementing $i up to $n, not from eg, the order of the files in the file system, which seems to be what was implied in the comment earlier.

[sjwright]

> If you design an impossible game, the only possible thing for anyone to do is to break it.

Which is the Kobayashi Maru in a nutshell. In that fictional case, Kirk was disqualified but also received a commendation.

[qbrass]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kobayashi_Maru_%28Star_Tre...

I don't know if the novel is canon, but it ought to be.

Kirk beat it by cheating, Scotty beat it legitimately, then proved that what he did only worked in the simulation.

[DanBC]

> If you design an impossible game, the only possible thing for anyone to do is to break it. If you then complain that THAT is cheating, you're a pedantic idiot - one of those annoying kids in middle school who loses a bet and then tries every possible way to weasel himself out.

The purpose for the impossible game was to provide a distraction to people going to Usenet comp.compression and announcing their brilliant new algorithm and claiming it could compress any file better than any other algorithm.

Obnoxiousness just means this challenge becomes interesting to code-golfers who will also try to obey the rules but produce a broken result.

[santoshalper]

He did offer the guy his money back. I think the challenge is all in good fun and the intent is ultimately that no money ends up changing hands.