Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Challenges

Comments on Is it stuck in a counting loop?

Post

Is it stuck in a counting loop?

+4
−0

Given a list of non-negative integers the function $f$ replaces every integer with the number of identical integers preceding it (not necessarily contiguously). So

f [1,1,2,2,1,3,3] = [1,2,1,2,3,1,2]

We will say that a list, $X$, is in a loop if there is some positive integer $n$ such that $f^n X = X$. That is, you can apply the function to $X$ some number of times to arrive at $X$.

Your task is to take a list as input and determine if that list is in a loop. You should output one of two consistent values, one if it is in a loop and the other if it is not.

This is code-golf. The goal is to minimize the size of your source code as measured in bytes.


A note: There are other ways to formulate this condition.

Test cases

[2,2] -> False
[1,1] -> True
[1,2] -> True
[1,1,2,2,3,3] -> True
[1,2,3,1,4,2,5,3] -> True
[1,2,1,3,1,2] -> True
[1,2,1,3,1,3,4,6] -> False
[1,2,2,3] -> False
History
Why does this post require moderator attention?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

1 comment thread

Why 1 and not 0? (1 comment)
Why 1 and not 0?
Lundin‭ wrote 5 months ago

In case of for example the first 1, there are zero identical numbers preceding it. So how does it become 1 and not 0? Shouldn't the text rather say "the number of identical integers preceding it, including itself" or something like that.