Timeline for Things to avoid when writing challenges
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 3, 2018 at 16:21 | comment | added | l4m2 | Can I say "lowest code length+running time(sec) win, at most 1000 char, at most 10 min"? | |
| Apr 11, 2016 at 9:37 | comment | added | Martin Ender Mod | @Qwertiy Re, answer length limit. You sure can (and we've had answers whose length was given in scientific notation), provided you can describe how the code is generated. Just think of Unary answers. There's no point (and it's impossible) to actually include the code in the answer, but all you need to know is how many 0s the program has. | |
| Apr 11, 2016 at 9:36 | comment | added | Martin Ender Mod | @Mego You're right that in your case having a negative score clearly makes it not a serious contender, but that's obvious for everyone to see and doesn't need an explicit rule. I think it's quite rare that there's such a clear cut-off as in your case, and in all other cases I'd rather have the community decide which answers are serious contenders and which aren't, instead of letting the OP guess an arbitrary threshold. | |
| Apr 11, 2016 at 9:35 | comment | added | Martin Ender Mod | @Qwertiy Probably not, because it's going to be beaten by a faster submission anyway, so it's exact score is irrelevant. If I designed the challenge such that all answers will take more than 24 hours, that's really my own fault, and requiring them to be faster than 1 minute isn't actually going to make them faster. Also with such an extreme difference, there's a good chance that the slow answer is intentionally slow which makes it invalid as not trying to compete (as per the help centre). | |
| Apr 11, 2016 at 9:31 | comment | added | Qwertiy | @MartinBüttner, but if some code executes 24 hours eating 100% of processor, are you really going to wait until it finishes? I mean, there should be some reasonable limit on time. By the way, about limit on length: the answer length is limited by 30K chars, so you can't post the anser longer than that. | |
| Apr 11, 2016 at 9:28 | comment | added | Martin Ender Mod | @Qwertiy That depends on the challenge. If it's a code golf, adding that as a validity criterion is fine, because it's not related to the scoring and only ensures efficient solutions. If it's a code-challenge/fastest-code along the lines of "scored by largest input you can handle in one minute", then that's also fine because time is not a variable that goes into scoring. But if you have a fastest code that says "fastest code wins, but you must be faster than one minute" you're back to saying "if you're not good enough you can't participate". | |
| Apr 11, 2016 at 9:23 | comment | added | Qwertiy | "the same applies to any other winning criterion" - what about program should terminate in one minute for input less than smth? | |
| Apr 11, 2016 at 1:22 | comment | added | user45941 | On the other hand, a minimum score may be a reasonable threshold for defining what qualifies as a serious contender. For example, on my latest challenge, I would consider submissions that do not have positive scores to not be serious contenders, because they failed the basic premise of the challenge (optimize the output length). | |
| Apr 8, 2016 at 5:26 | comment | added | user45941 | +1, but if an author really wanted a score threshold, I would be OK with answers that do not meet the score threshold being allowed but being marked as not competitive. | |
| Apr 7, 2016 at 21:13 | history | edited | xnor | CC BY-SA 3.0 | Keeping parallelism with "things to avoid" |
| Apr 7, 2016 at 9:54 | history | answered | Martin EnderMod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |