Should bonuses be allowed for [code-golf] questions?

Question

Prompted by a discussion between Peter Taylor and myself, I'd like to solicit the community's opinion on the following issue:

Should awarding score bonuses for extra features disqualify a challenge from being tagged as code-golf, or is it enough that the primary scoring criterion is code length?

Also, does it matter if the bonus scores are only used to break ties between equally long answers (as in this challenge), or if the bonus can be formulated as an unusual length-counting rule (e.g. this challenge, where, effectively, the eight characters comprising the string "goldbach" are free if they appear in the code in that order)?

---

In particular, should the following questions (currently all tagged as code-golf; not an exhaustive list) be retagged as code-challenge?

• Happy Birthday to Me! (the challenge that sparked this discussion)
• Find columns where all characters are the same (one of my own old challenges, features a −½ char tie-breaker bonus)
• Draw the Olympic Games logo
• All Your Base Are Belong To Us (Restricted)
• Count sum of all digits
• The shifting dot
• Generate a random program in your favorite language
• Star programming!
• Create a rotating quine
• Shortest Program to Sort a List of numbers into Odd and Even Category
• The Strange Unsorting Machine for Nefarious Purposes
• Build an analog clock
• Determine if a number is divisible by 13 (without using 13 itself)
• Implement hyperexponentiation/tetration without the use of '^'
• Sum of (at most) 5 primes
• create an ascii progress bar
• Reverse Engineer Polling Statistics
• Hello World Rainbow
• Advanced Code Golf - Disk Operations, and File Allocation
• stupid restrictions and desert
• Make a simple IRC bot.
• Solve the 14-Pegs puzzle
• Compute the difference between two days.
• Convert radicals to mixed & entire radicals and to real numbers
• Unique Sudoku Finder
• Dice from Changing Random Generator
• Breaking Perfect Hangman in reverse, in reverse
• Sum of Products of Subsets
• Hide one message inside another
• Four weights to produce integer scale differences from 0 through 40 pounds
• Shortest self-modifying code to wish a happy New Year!

(List mostly compiled based on a search for [code-golf] bonus is:question, filtered to exclude simple false posistives and any questions where the bonus is "imaginary" or not well defined.)

---

The only written policy I've found on this is the code-golf tag wiki excerpt, which currently includes the following sentence (added by Peter in July '13):

"A competition which scores on a mixture of source length and some other criterion should be tagged [code-challenge] instead."

There doesn't seem to have been any meta discussion about this that I could find, so I figured I'd start one myself.

Answer 1

No, bonuses should not be allowed in code golf

There's broad support that bonuses in code golf should generally be avoided. I think that moving bonuses from code-golf to code-challenge would emphasize that bonuses aren't a twist you put in for the heck of it, but make for a different kind of challenge you should choose only if you consider the bonuses vital to the challenge.

The other argument is from purity. In code-golf, your goal is to minimize the number of bytes of the code. With scores like

112 bytes * 70% = 78.4 bytes

the resulting 78.4 isn't actually a byte count, but a score that's a function of the code length and the features it implements. So, it should be treated like any challenge scored on multiple factors, for which code-challenge has been used as a "misc". (It might also be worth classifying code-challenge's into more specific tags.)

I disagree with ugoren's argument that these are still basically code golf.

... As long as modifications don't change the main focus, they don't change anything. In some extreme cases, the modifiers may become the main challenge, and golfing becomes more of a tie breaker. Then it shouldn't be tagged code-golf, but these are quite rare.

It would be great if it were just extreme cases, but often I see bonuses that steal the spotlight and are central to deciding a winner. Sometimes a bonus is so large that any competitive answer must do it, and other times it's a trap that's just not worth the bytes to implement. Choosing the right bonuses to achieve or ignore is often more influential than the quality of your golfing.

Answer 2

I don't thing the tag needs to cover all nuances.

If the main task is to write the shortest program that achieves a task, it's code golf. As long as modifications don't change the main focus, they don't change anything.

In some extreme cases, the modifiers may become the main challenge, and golfing becomes more of a tie breaker. Then it shouldn't be tagged code-golf, but these are quite rare.

Also, I'm not sure when is code-challenge appropriate. Isn't everything on this site a code challenge? I think it's mostly used for challenges that don't match any specific tag.

Answer 3

I have never been very worried about code-golf++ questions, but if they are bothering people or if people like them enough to want them to be searchable, how about a new tag?

Something like modified-golf.

We already have proposals and active tags for some other "special" golfing rules.

Answer 4

I think there are some cases where mixed criteria could make sense in pure code-golf, although most of the examples given are not those cases. The primary case being a challenge where not only the program but also the solution can be (purely and objectively) golfed.

For example The 3L and 5L Jugs (aka Die Hard) challenge is a case where there are many ways to solve for a given number but there is also an optimized solution for each number. It would have been reasonable to score that challenge on a combination of code length and number of total steps required to solve all numbers 1 to 100. To my mind, both of those are golfing criteria: optimization to reduce the size of the solution. And the net effect is that you discourage people from reducing the size of their program by reducing the quality of their solution.

A bonus like the -8 points for Goldbach, on the other hand, is not a golfing bonus. It certainly introduces a legitimate element of fun and challenge, but it also introduces a meta-gaming aspect in which you have to consider the choice to implement the bonus feature vs. the characters it will cost. The Die Hard problem with the hypothetical scoring modification would have no such meta-gaming. It is a simple matter of the optimal program running the optimal solution.

That last sentence is what I have always presumed to be the mission statement of the code-golf tag.