Post a crack to a cracked CNR submission

Question

When answering a CNR challenge it's common to get the response: "Well done, but that was definitely not what I had in mind".

I feel like it should be perfectly fine for anyone to post a second crack if OP says the intended solution was substantially different. The first crack is of course still valid, but the challenge could still be a very interesting to others, since they know there are other, possibly more complicated, complex or obscure solutions.

I've never seen anyone posting a second crack, and OP often posts "The intended solution was: abcde. (I've done this myself quite a few times).

Can we encourage others to post a second crack to the cop post if there is a substantially different solution to it? This would also mean that Cops are discouraged to post the intended solution until the SAFE-date, even if it's already cracked.

Answer 1

Sure, but by default, only the first crack should receive credit. This would keep it in line with our current policy, while allowing additional cracks (that would be non-competing). Challenge authors can override this default if desired.

Answer 2

In some cases the new crack could be more interesting or obviously more intended. But in other cases this could be too open-ended.

Instead, we should encourage the cops to fix their submissions and post new versions. If that couldn't be fixed, it fails to be a competitive cop answer, so it doesn't make too much sense to have more robber answers related to it either.

If we really want to allow the new robbers, we should find some ways to decide which answer is better, for example the shortest. Then we could allow posting competitive answers using different approaches in some challenges, or even give credit to better answers. But we shouldn't encourage subjectively "interesting" cracks. Specifically, we shouldn't encourage:

• Guessing the original intention;
• Accepting arbitrary restrictions made by the cop;
• Adding "creative" (in a sense that doesn't really help cracking) cracks to a too weak cop.

At least we shouldn't vote for these reasons. Cracks with the first 2 features could be competitive, too, though. But most are not.

In any cases you can always post the supposedly better cracks in comments.