You are taking a suboptimal path around the circle with centre at (2.83323324984,-1.17841666332). The path above and to the right of this circle is shorter.

The Wikipedia article on OCR-A is fairly detailed. If you want the TrueType font file, it can be downloaded for free from fontzone.com.

Still, I couldn't find a specification of this font online, so it was trial and error on my side to find specific patterns for digits.

Hi,

It is meaningful because it's the "upper left corner of the ending of the spiral (when you're in the x area. I'm afaraid I cannot do better as an explanation, sorry...)

   |x
+--+x 
|xxxx
|xxxx
+---...

NOTE: Extra spaces before or after the code have no meaning and should be ignored.

C++ tests are not correct. Your solution does not follow the problem specification: All operations with the same precedence should be evaluated from left to right. Here is a simple example: 74 * 71 / 33. This expression must be computed as (74 * 71) / 33. The expected result is 159.21212121212122. But your solution returns 159.2121212121212.

At no point in time a glider would mutate into a 2x2 square.
You can check expeted result with some GoL simulator, for example here: https://playgameoflife.com/

No worries. You can post images here by using the markdown format:

![image fallback text](image_url "image title")

I don't think Codewars will host images though, you need to put them on some other site.

I think I found it: the 6th test case in the "Low Contrast" test group, a 200 x 181 image showing the digits "61".

The image is recognizably similar to the one you posted, but of better quality.

I don't know where the version you saw came from, though.

Most of the random tests have the random seed set to a fixed value, so that the same images appear every time. If you can't see the bad image now, maybe your code was not parsing it correctly before?

That image doesn't look right. Which test group does it come from, and which language are you using?

How the hell is Brute-force fast enough but backtracking isnt?

Confusing message is problem with a kata, but it's caused by some mistake in your solution. I raised appropriate issue in a new thread above, but until it gets fixed, you won't get clear 'expected' value :(
See this paragraph of FAQ on how to check the test input, recreate the test case locally, and try to find the error.

In this particular case it looks that expected array should have one element, while you return an array of four elements.

Curious. A floating-point arithmetic issue, maybe?