GC2KBNA Food and/or Drink 100 items

Question

Would it be possible to run a checker that would include food along with drinks?  I see that you have a food checker, but not drinks.

Thanks.

Answer 1

No this is not possible, there are too many items to put in a checker like this.

In your question you mention A food checker I think 

GC5KQMB - Hungry? - RM Challenge #95 (United States)

This checker is tagged by the cache owner and has only a limited amount of food items to check on.

Answer 2

Just think for a moment of the thousands of different food items and different ways of preparing them to make different dishes then multiply that by the number of different languages. Do the same for drinks.

Now imagine the length of the list that would be required to be present in a checker to check against and it should be fairly obvious that this sort of general checker is impossible.

Basically a checker has to have a means of checking if the value is true or not for a list of food/drinks/boys names/girls names etc etc. This means of checking is in these sorts of cases by a list of what is valid and what is not.

The problem then becomes is it physically possible to create a list of all valid possible answers. If you cannot create a lists of all possible answers then the checker isn't possible.

Comments

I "checker" could be possible
You cant write one that knows if you don pass but it could find that you did by using a list of list of ok answess. The prolem is that the checker can only answer pass of fail. a third state perhaps called "dont know" could be a result for an incomplete checker. And you can display the list of matching caches you have found

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Indeed if you careful read my message you will see I totally get that you could have an incomplete checker that might work for many answers but it would potentially give lots of false negatives. Ie: fails where a the user actually passed. Your "don't know" state. Since as you say the current design is binary that isn't currently an option as I understand it. Thus the checker would give false results, correct?

I have 35 years programming experience. Writing something to partially check is fine but in the absence of a complete dictionary of answers to check no checker is going to accurately give a list of all possible foods. For example.

Since the user posting the question gave the impression they thought doing a drink one would be easy since a partial food one was done I was attempting to explain the scope of the problem in producing a comprehensive solution.

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Yes you could only do that if there was more possible return values then true of false. If not it would result in alot of false negative.

And English is an easy language to parse words in because there is few form of a words. for example apple and apples but in swedish you have at least five  äpple äpplet äpplets äpplena äpplenas
And combination is two words in english and one i swedish. Apple pie =Äppelpaj
And of course not all combination with that word is a food item
Pie = paj is a part of the cache "Pajala Riverside" but Pajala is the name of a towen and the name has nothing to do with a pie.

And it is even harder if the word in the name has to refer to a food item and not just has it in the name. Banana in Swedish is banan but is spelled the same (but pounced differently) as the way part in railway and is also in other cases for an area to do something on. It also used for separate to refer to for example a railway line. Of five cacher with only banan in the title only one refer to the fruit. There is no way to know the difference without reading and understanding the description. And that is a hard problem