👋 Meet Golfbot

"Brevity is the soul of great code"—Shakespeare (pretty sure).

Ever tried code golf? The game is to use as few characters as possible to do as much as possible.

We have two levels of Golfbot challenges: 256 characters (easy mode) and 128 characters (hard mode).

Start practicing your putting, and share your entry with other challengers to see if they can make it even shorter.

⛳️ What can you do?

Well, anything—and very little.

Looking for inspiration? 10Print is a lovely little program that's just 38 characters long but generates infinite possibilities.

Here's the code in Commodore 64 BASIC:

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

When you run the code (on a Commodore 64), it prints a little maze on screen, like this:

We love this program so much we've incorporated it into the design of Meet the Noops: here is an animated version of 10print written in JavaScript.

How Golfbot works

There's no API for this challenge, and we're going to try something a little different. We're inviting you to submit solutions to the challenges as pull requests.

Choose a challenge

10Print. Implement 10print in the language of your choice, in less than 256 characters. Running the program in the terminal or console should yield the pattern.

Hexcode generator. Create a hexcode generator that would (eventually) emit all 16,777,216 hexcodes in less than 256 characters.

Conway's Game of Life. Write an implementation of Conway's Life in the fewest characters possible.

Submit your solution as a Pull Request

In the repo we have a challenges folder, with subfolders for each challenge.

In your pull request, create a new folder with your GitHub username, like so:

/challenges/10print/entries/{github-username}

Add your code, a README, and a screenshot of the code.

If Golfbot likes it, we'll merge it into master.

If you have an idea for a challenge, add an issue.

✨ A little inspiration

There are active communities dedicated to Code Golf, like Dwitter (demos less than 140 characters), codegolf.stackexchange.com, and r/codegolf. Browse through the posts to see the very clever, and very concise, things you're able to do when dealing with extreme constraints.