Are well-studied or classic problems suitable for PP&CG?

Question

Brainfucked Bots is a clone of BF Joust

Bzzt is very similar to FizzBuzz

FizzBuzz Compiler was effectively FizzBuzz before its scoring was changed

etc.

In challenges like this, where years of thought have been put into optimal solutions during competitions elsewhere, it is very unlikely that an original answer is going to win. The best answer already exists on the internet, and someone (or multiple someones) is going to submit it, or a small variation on it.

This concern also applies to ideas posted elsewhere on meta to intentionally repost challenges from sites like SPOJ or Programming Praxis or Project Euler, etc.

Are questions like this really suitable here? What do we want, or expect, to see in the answers?

Answer 1

Inspired by is welcome

I don't see any problem with posting questions inspired by known solved problems, where the answers will not just be the known solutions copied and pasted. If a problem has been solved but not golfed, it can still make an interesting golf question. If a problem has been golfed elsewhere but not optimised, it may make an interesting code challenge. If the question adds a non-trivial extra challenge or new perspective I welcome it.

Identical is boring

I agree that asking the same question with no changes is boring. Even if you take the approach of tackling the question without looking at the known answers, it's not as fun to compete against people knowing some of them will be basing their answers on existing research.

Know the difference

What I would be wary of is genuinely new questions being closed hastily because they appear to have known solutions. This could be a problem where the difference is subtle but rules out existing known solutions. Also a question that genuinely is already solved could be tweaked to be more interesting, so could still make a good question eventually. In either case I would encourage comments to let the question poster know that clarification would help.

Off-site duplicates

I'd be inclined to close vote if there's any doubt what the question poster intended, to make sure any required changes are made before answers come in. However if it's already clear that the intention is to post a solved problem, then I wouldn't close vote as it isn't an on-site duplicate, even if it is clearly an off-site duplicate.

I would be happy to reject such off-site duplicates if we had a change to our guidelines, but under current guidelines I don't see them as something to close, just something boring to consider down voting.