Re^3: Perl Golf Ethics

[thospel]

I agree that this was very unfortunate, but let's not try to read too much into it.

From an email exchange I know that the organizers didn't know about that particular very relevant historical golf, so it certainly wasn't intentional. I'm quite sure they would not have chosen this challenge if they had known.

The link to the relevant code was in shmems post in this very thread. You being part of the perlmonks community made that information available to you too.

As the other solutions in that historical golf show, not hitting on the magic method doesn't loose a good golfer more than (order of magnitude) 5 strokes. This might indeed be enough to pass a few people on the scoreboard, but it's in fact less than the average distance between players.

[petdance]

I agree that this was very unfortunate, but let's not try to read too much into it.

I'm not reading anything into it at all. I'm merely saying that it rankles me that I spent over a week on a contest that I thought was a challenge of cleverness and coding skill, not research and being in-the-know.

[eyepopslikeamosquito]

it rankles me that I spent over a week on a contest that I thought was a challenge of cleverness and coding skill, not research and being in-the-know

Sorry Andy, but that's rubbish. With more cleverness and coding skill you could have easily gone 50 strokes lower, as, for example, ambrus did -- he posted a 137 in just one day, with little prior golfing experience and without knowing Ton's magic algorithm.

[petdance]

I'm not saying that I couldn't have done better. I'm saying that the key to actually winning was happening to know that there was a secret.

[runrig]

I spent 3 all nighters, and then some, coming up with my answer, getting down to 203, and enjoyed the time I spent on it. I wondered (but then gave up) about getting even a t-shirt out of it. Then I saw this thread and eventually found ton's code, and half an answer to the problem. And had some more fun trying to golf down the other half. My daughter even helped in choosing characters to use for variable names ("try a sqiggle there...")...I told her she could have the t-shirt if I won :-)

Without ton's code, I would have gotten 31st, which would still have been a pretty darn respectable position, and yes, you would have beaten me(28th!), and my hat's off to you for that, but neither of us would have won a prize. I do wonder how many used ton's code (or some other from the same source), and how we all would have done if that were not the case (it's all published, so someone could pretty easily figure it out). I am grateful to PerlMonks though, for the leg up :-) I'm sorry you feel it was a waste of time :-(

I really wish there could be a contest for good code, based on efficiency, maintainability, etc, but then of course it wouldn't be as easy to score :-)