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code-golf / code-golf

A game designed to let you show off your code-fu by solving problems in the least number of characters.
https://code.golf
MIT License
1.12k stars 102 forks source link

Monthly challenges that reveal the solution afterwards #157

Open prplz opened 4 years ago

prplz commented 4 years ago

At the start of the month, a new hole appears. At the start of the next month no more entries are allowed and all solutions to the hole become visible to the public and the cycle continues.

I think this helps with the common complaint that you can't see any code, and would be a good reference to start learning golf tricks.

SirBogman commented 4 years ago

It's an interesting idea. I might be hesitant to use some of my compression techniques that could be applied to a wide variety of holes though.

I suppose these one off challenges wouldn't count towards the overall score, since that wouldn't be fair for newcomers. But we would probably want some way of showing the results on the user pages.

JRaspass commented 4 years ago

My main concern would be finding the time to come up with a new hole every month, as in stands I'm stretched pretty thin just trying to modernise the infrastructure of the site (cleaning up my horrible early go, adding tests, moving to docker/digital ocean, etc). I also dislike that monthly holes are a wasted effort after the month. Either way I wouldn't contribute these holes to your overall score, a new player should always be able to climb the leaderboards imo.

With regards to learning golfing tricks, I did have two ideas. The simplest is to add some kind of wiki to the site so people can contribute tricks. The second would be a forum though perhaps gated that you need to have enough points/holes/trophies to gain access, so a reward of sorts where the top n% of players can discuss tips, tricks, or whatever.

primo-ppcg commented 4 years ago

I quite like the idea, although I wonder if one month might be too frequent / too short. Each challenge can have it's own scoreboard, but I agree with @JRaspass that they shouldn't contribute to overall score.

These holes could also allow post-mortems (marked clearly as such), but only if the solution is strictly shorter than the previous best in that language.