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Event chatroom!

Well, 2022's come to an end, and so that means: Best of CGCC 2022!

In this thread, we'll consolidate the categories for our Best Posts of 2022, and eventually we'll vote on which posts will win for each category. In this thread, we are looking for two things:

  • Categories to classify exceptional posts from 2022 (e.g. Best Mathematical Insight or Rookie of the Year)
  • Bounties offered to reward the winners in those categories

Please nominate categories as answers to this question. Each answer should contain a category for a challenge or answer to be rewarded. The top-voted categories will then receive separate nomination posts to find the actual winners. Like previous years, I'm not going to state a fixed number of categories that will make it, but it's probably going to be between 5 and 15. Last year was slightly complicated, but we've usually gone with between 5 and 15 in previous years.

Feel free to resubmit categories from last year or previous years, regardless of whether they were among the final selected categories or not.

Voting on categories should last around 2 weeks, but this is by no means a hard limit, and we'll be happy to extend it further if new category nominations are still incoming.

Offered bounties

Last year, we offered bounties to the winners. If you want to offer a bounty, please edit your name and the amount in below, or leave a comment or ping in the chatroom and I'll edit it in.

  • emanresu A (+2500)
  • caird coinheringaahing (+2500)
  • alephalpha (+1000)
  • Steffan (+1000)
  • pxeger (+1000)
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  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ How will bounties be distributed? Equal share between the categories? What if this leads to an amount smaller than what can be bountied? \$\endgroup\$
    – mousetail
    Jan 2 at 20:18
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    \$\begingroup\$ @mousetail Typically, 500 rep is awarded to each winner. If the bounty pool isn't enough, then some people typically contribute some more rep if willing to cover that \$\endgroup\$
    – caird coinheringaahin g Mod
    Jan 2 at 22:24

17 Answers 17

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Best mathematical insight

Repost of 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018.

On this site we often see answers in languages specifically designed for short code, or designed to be fast. Sometimes, a nice golfing trick or speed-up technique surprises us with its ingenuity, beyond the standard use of that language.

And occasionally an answer shows up that uses an unexpected approach to greatly simplify the problem, and makes us wonder how the author could ever think of that. This usually involves some far-from-obvious mathematical equivalence, or a particularly simple approach to the problem that was not evident at all (once revealed, other answers often follow the same approach).

This category is for the answer with the best mathematical insight or unexpected approach that led to greatly simplifying the problem, in any challenge type (code golf, fastest code, or others). The insight should have led to a significant improvement according to the challenge's metric (code length, run time, or whatever applicable).

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Wrong tool for the job

Repost from 2018, 2021

This category is for an answers that use the worst possible language to accomplish a task, while still making an effort to optimize the score. For example, writing a non-trivial program while using an extremely minimalist language like 7, or an inconvenient language like lost, or even a normal language that's missing some crucial capability like internet connectivity or image processing.

Answers for this category should consider both the difficulty of the task and the unsuitable-ness of the language.

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Slowest Gun in the East

Repost from 2021, 2018, 2017, 2016

Too often, late answers are overlooked, and end up with fewer upvotes than answers posted immediately after the challenge is posted. This category is aimed to reward impressive answers posted a while after the challenge was originally posted and that went unappreciated, compared to the FGITW answers.

SGITE 2022 query.

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    \$\begingroup\$ What speed do guns in north have I wonder \$\endgroup\$
    – mousetail
    Jan 3 at 8:54
  • \$\begingroup\$ @mousetail In the north they tend to use larger caliber guns that shoot slower, because polar bears \$\endgroup\$
    – Rydwolf Programs
    Jan 14 at 19:38
  • \$\begingroup\$ I actually solved it. Gun of the north is when you post an answer to a old question, and thereby re-popularizing it, leading to several other answers. So it's slowest gun in the east but also the fastest in a new batch of answers \$\endgroup\$
    – mousetail
    Jan 14 at 20:50
  • \$\begingroup\$ @mousetail And what about the south? \$\endgroup\$
    – Kevin Cruijssen
    Jan 14 at 21:54
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Rookie of the Year - Answers

Repost from 2021 and other years.

For the best answer written by a new user in 2022. This doesn't have to be a user who created their account in 2022 - rather, this is for any answer posted by a user in 2022 where that answer was that user's first answer on the site.

SEDE query (modified from the 2021 one)

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Breaking The Mold (Most Original Challenge)

Reposted from 2021, 2018

It's really easy to come up with normal and , or challenge, etc. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with these challenges. They're the meat of the challenges on our site. However, they're not the most imaginative.

This category is for a challenge that re-invents the wheel, and explores new ideas that we haven't really used on the site.

  • Maybe this challenge inspired a new tag, or category of challenges?

  • Maybe it's a with a unique and very well balanced scoring formula?

Or maybe it's even a challenge about a novel task. This category is for rewarding users who came up with interesting ideas that keep the site fresh.

Some justification for why the challenge is original is necessary with nominations - 99% of challenges posted on the site shouldn't qualify for this.

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Most diverse challenge

meta: title

Often, there is one real algorithm to solve a challenge that is competetive. Maybe very esoteric or specialized languages need a different approach, but mostly, every answer is just a translation of the others.

This award is for challenges with no clear single approach where very different algorithms can be competitive. These are the most fun to solve, since you can't just translate other answers but need to carefully consider which approach to take, or even to invent a new one.

This prize is intended specifically for:

Challenges where:

  • There are either many approaches or just a few that are very different
  • All of which are competitive
  • Even in the same/similar languages
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Best Explanation

Repost from 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016

This category is for the answer with the best explanation accompanying it. Ideally, the winner will be an answer with a very detailed explanation that is accessible to anyone, regardless of the amount of relevant knowledge already possessed.

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Best tip

Repost from 2021, 2020, 2019, 2017, 2016

For the best answer to a question tagged with , because this site isn't just about competing with one another, but also about helping each other improve our golfing skills.

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Rookie of the Year - Challenges

Repost of 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018.

For the best challenge written by someone who has not written a challenge prior to 2022.

SEDE query thanks to mousetail

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Most unexpected outcome

Repost from 2021

An answer that you didn’t expect to work, or do something else, but unexpectedly did some weird behavior and made the answer valid.

This could involve some interpreter bug, or obscure feature that wasn’t documented nor known by many people.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ About "you didn’t expect to work", don't you think that's a little subjective? \$\endgroup\$
    – UndoneStudios
    Jan 5 at 12:16
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    \$\begingroup\$ @UndoneStudios all of these are subjective :P \$\endgroup\$
    – Seggan
    Jan 5 at 22:58
  • \$\begingroup\$ I meant like since "you didn’t expect to work" is based on the poster, so they could simply just claim that to get this bounty. \$\endgroup\$
    – UndoneStudios
    Jan 6 at 4:57
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    \$\begingroup\$ Maybe it could be phrased like "doesn't look like it would work" to make it less dependent on who thinks it works or not \$\endgroup\$
    – mousetail
    Jan 6 at 14:19
  • \$\begingroup\$ @UndoneStudios it was based on the one who viewed the answer instead of one who wrote the answer (like the situation where you thought it was obviously a wrong answer in first glance, but it runs perfectly fine once you try to run it) \$\endgroup\$
    – okie
    Jan 7 at 0:20
  • \$\begingroup\$ In that case it should be phrased "An answer that the viewer wouldn't expect to work" \$\endgroup\$
    – UndoneStudios
    Jan 8 at 14:31
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Kansas City Shuffle

Reposted from 2021 2018 2017 2016

Too often, someone devises a particularly golfy method of solving a challenge, which most people will use that method for their answers. This award goes to those answers that utilize an alternative method as a better solution than the method that the majority of other answers use (prior to the posting of the rewarded answer).

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Most significant impact via Meta

Repost from 2021

Meta is an important yet often overlooked portion of this site, where significant rules changes are decided, and the site becomes the most democratic. It allows people to present their visions of the site, and for others to show their agreement or disagreement, and contributions can be just as important - if not more - than posts on Main.

This category is to reward Meta posts that have had a non-trivial or significant impact on the site in some way, and the users who proposed them.

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Best non-text answer

There are a few "languages" here that are allowed to compete, but do not have a textual representation in their native form. Examples are Piet, Scratch, The Powder Toy, and even Minecraft redstone. For most (all?) of these, we have found ways to convert them to the byte-based representation we all know and love. For the above, respectively, they are ASCII-Piet, scratchblocks , TPT save files, and structure files. This prize will go to the best answer in a language that does not have a textual representation natively.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ The wording is a bit unclear to me here. Is this just for textual languages that imitate a graphical language, or also for languages that are just graphical? For example pure-data is primarily graphical but is saved in a textual format, the same goes for Piet, image files can be scored, but you mention ASCII-piet. \$\endgroup\$
    – Wheat Wizard Mod
    Jan 10 at 18:00
  • \$\begingroup\$ @WheatWizard that would be the second option \$\endgroup\$
    – Seggan
    Jan 10 at 18:08
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Most improved answer

Repost from: 2021

This category is to reward the continued work users put into answers long after they have been posted. After the FGITW effect has dissipated there stops being so much incentive to work on an old answer, but some users put in the effort and really make it shine. The ideal answer here would be one that demonstrates a significant commitment to improvement regardless of the quality of the initial answer. This could be improving the score, or the explanation or both.

Answers in this category don't have to have been initially posted in 2022 but the improvements have to have been made over the course of the year.

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Most helpful Sandbox commenter

Repost from 2021.

The Sandbox is a very useful tool to help improve people's challenges, and functions best when users provide helpful advice and feedback on the drafts.

This category should reward the users who helped the most in the Sandbox during 2022.

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Most involvement in an answer/answers

Repost of 2020, 2021

For an answer or multiple answers where multiple people were involved. This could be multiple people helping out a user on a single answer, or a back-and-forth between two or more answers trying to outgolf each other.

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Off the Charts

Repost from 2021

For an answer that has been proven to work correctly but can't realistically be run, for example because it would take an enormous amount of time to execute.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I think this category is a tad uninteresting, as it was last year. It isn't hard to create a program that takes a long time, especially with languages geared towards brute force solutions. If this is to be included it needs a more objective scoring criteria, like maybe the quality of the proof of correctness. \$\endgroup\$
    – mousetail
    Jan 2 at 20:15

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