[Community Puzzle] Chinese Numbers - Puzzle discussion

Puzzles
1

Coding Games and Programming Challenges to Code Better

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Created by @Delicious31415,validated by @DeanTheMachine,@Supoz9 and @ManuelJ.
If you have any issues, feel free to ping them.

2

As a Chinese, I think the description had a lot of misconceptions (Just nitpicking, it does not have anything to do with problem solving). :smirk:

  • zero is denoted as 零 in the formal writing of both simplified and traditional Chinese whilst 〇 is the informal one. In fact I only seen it to represent year of a calendar few times, like 二〇二五（2025）

  • For 二 (two), the first horizontal line must be shorter than the second one, so it should be like so to be accurate

*000*
*****
*****
*****
00000
  • Same goes for three where the first and second horizontal line should be equally shorter than the third line)
*000*
*****
*000*
*****
00000
  • For 六 (six), the two vertical * should be slightly steeped to the right, same as 丶 
*0***
**0**
00000
*0*0*
0***0
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3

Also even though I had yet to solve this, I think it is too similar to this Coding Games and Programming Challenges to Code Better

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4

Solved it after a month, should have been a clash than a puzzle tbh (Some issues apart from what was mentioned earlier: ~~

  • The rows are fixed to size of 5, meaning we only need to consider changes in column sizes

  • Each line is already separated by a space, so even easier than building a loop with string-based chunking

  • The example does not demonstrate this case clearly

    Chinese characters in input are separated by a space.

  • Following should be re-worded (5 strings != 5 lines of strings) (a number == combination of the 5 lines of string, with each line having a chunk size of 5)

    The input is 5 strings, where each group of 5 in each string is a number.

5

Revised.

I didn’t quote your first comment in full, but regarding that and the other character design issues you mentioned, the main limitation is the 5×5 grid. With only 25 pixels to work with, it’s very difficult to capture the characters accurately.

For example, it’s essentially impossible to draw 零 (0) in such a small grid because of the number of strokes, which is why 〇 is the only practical choice.

I agree that the design of 二 (2) could be improved, but I don’t think the designs for 三 (3) and 六 (6) are entirely off. For 三, while it’s usually written with two shorter strokes at the top, some computer fonts render the top stroke with an intermediate length. Similarly, for 六, although the top stroke is typically slanted, some fonts do use a vertical stroke. That said, I admit the version in the puzzle does end up looking a bit like 大 instead :laughing:.

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6

Yeah, didn’t realize that…

Sorry to whoever needed / needs it…

7

Sorry guys. This was one of my first contributions and didn’t really know much about these things. Hopefully my more recent ones are better and are improving. :cry: :grinning:

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