Good afternoon!

Let's get busy putting ChatGPT through it's AI acrobatics shall we!

The problem we are going to be looking at today is the following:

Write a function, which takes a non-negative integer (seconds) as input and returns the time in a human-readable format (HH:MM:SS)

HH = hours, padded to 2 digits, range: 00 - 99
MM = minutes, padded to 2 digits, range: 00 - 59
SS = seconds, padded to 2 digits, range: 00 - 59
The maximum time never exceeds 359999 (99:59:59)

You can find some examples in the test fixtures.

Now as the fixtures will likely be different for each language we are going to use today, I will not bother sharing them but for the purpose of this exercise, each time I ask ChatGPT to solve the puzzle, I will provide it the fixtures.

Solving it in Haskell

humanReadable :: Int -> String
humanReadable seconds =
  let hours = seconds `div` 3600
      minutes = (seconds `div` 60) `mod` 60
      secs = seconds `mod` 60
  in pad hours ++ ":" ++ pad minutes ++ ":" ++ pad secs
  where pad n = if n < 10 then "0" ++ show n else show n

I am going to be honest, I wasn't expecting this to pass first time but it did! Solid work there from our pair programming AI.

Solving it in JavaScript

function humanReadable(seconds) {
  const hours = Math.floor(seconds / 3600);
  const minutes = Math.floor((seconds % 3600) / 60);
  const secs = seconds % 60;

  return pad(hours) + ':' + pad(minutes) + ':' + pad(secs);
}

function pad(num) {
  return (num < 10 ? '0' : '') + num;
}

Another first time success for JavaScript in this instance, let's move on and see what we can C, C, C

Solving it in C

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdbool.h>

void do_test(unsigned seconds, const char *expected);

void human_readable(unsigned seconds, char* output) {
    unsigned hours = seconds / 3600;
    unsigned minutes = (seconds / 60) % 60;
    unsigned secs = seconds % 60;

    snprintf(output, 9, "%02u:%02u:%02u", hours, minutes, secs);
}

void do_test(unsigned seconds, const char *expected) {
    char actual[9];
    human_readable(seconds, actual);
    cr_assert_str_eq(actual, expected);
}

Above is the first attempt, I wrote the question exactly the same as I had the previous two times but here we hit our first failure.

This code did not pass so I went back and asked ChatGPT to try again and provided it with the following function stub:

char *human_readable_time (unsigned seconds, char *time_string)
{
    *time_string = '\0'; // write to time_string
    return time_string; // return it
}

A few seconds later I had a new solution to try:

#include <stdio.h>

char *human_readable_time(unsigned seconds, char *time_string) {
    int hours = seconds / 3600;
    int minutes = (seconds / 60) % 60;
    int remaining_seconds = seconds % 60;
    sprintf(time_string, "%02d:%02d:%02d", hours, minutes, remaining_seconds);
    return time_string;
}

This solution passed and all was well!

I appreciate that these may not be the most exciting of articles I am writing at the moment but we are doing the software community a great service in conducting some pretty trivial scientific research!

Catch you all on the next one!

ChatGPT - Complex Coding Challenges: 5 KYU