Best of CGCC 2023 - Call for categories

Question

Update

Nominations are now open!

If you want to submit any more categories throughout the year, until the last few weeks of the year, you can still do so by answering this question. If a category here gains net score > 3, I will add it as a category accepting nominations.

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After good meta consensus with only some minor and fixable problems, the Best Of CGCC nominations process is changing for 2023.

In this thread, we'll consolidate the categories for our Best Posts for 2023, and then we'll open nominations for posts in each category. Nominations will remain open throughout the year, and voting will be in the first week of January 2024. Unlike in previous years, in this thread, we are only looking for categories, not bounties (yet). Bounties can be offered to reward the winners in those categories at the same time voting goes live.

Please nominate categories as answers to this question. Each answer should contain a category to classify exceptional posts from 2023 (e.g. Best Mathematical Insight or Rookie of the Year). 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, which is what we've usually gone with 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 suggestions are still incoming.

Answer 1

Most diverse challenge

repost from 2022

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

Answer 2

Best sequel

Originality is great, we love challenges that provide a new fresh take on things. But sometimes unoriginal ideas are just as good. This award is for challenges that take the ideas of an earlier challenge (by the same or different author) and improve on them or twist them in a new and interesting way.

Nominations should include both the challenge being nominated and any "prequels" to help give context.

Answer 3

Wild card

Repost from 2021

For a deserving challenge, answer, or user that isn't a good fit for any of the other categories.

Answer 4

Rookie of the Year - Answers

Repost from 2022, 2021 and other years.

For the best answer written by a new user in 2023. This doesn't have to be a user who created their account in 2023 - rather, this is for any answer posted by a user in 2023 where that answer was that user's first answer on the site.

SEDE query (modified from 2022)

Answer 5

Wrong tool for the job

Repost from 2018, 2021, 2022, but rephrased significantly

Technically, every turing complete language should be able to solve every problem. In practice though, some problems are really hard in particular languages and are thus rarely used. While you can, for example, invent multiplication in a language that doesn't have it, it's a lot of effort for little benefit.

However, some brave souls are not afraid of a challenge. They'll solve array challenges in languages that lack arrays. They'll solve random challenges in languages lacking a easy to use RNG. This category of for them. Those who don't care about spending a while day solving a challenge that would be <100 bytes of python.

In short, this answer is for challenges that:

• Solve a challenge in a language that's lacking the basic features that would normally be used for this type of challenge
• This could be because the language has a specific weakness or because it's just really hard to use for all problems
• Is still a good attempt to improve the score, within the limits of the language.

Answer 6

Slowest Gun in the East

Repost from 2022, 2021, 2018, 2017, 2016,

There are a lot of really good old questions on this site. Unfortunatly, new answers to them tend to gain very little votes or interaction compared with answers to new challenges.

This category is for underappreciated new answers to challenges where the last interaction was at least 1 year before the post was made.

SGITE 2023 query.

Answer 7

Rookie of the Year - Challenges

Repost of 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018.

For the best challenge written by someone who has not written a challenge prior to 2023.

SEDE query (modified from 2022)

Answer 8

Best mathematical insight

Repost of 2022, 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).

Answer 9

Best Explanation

Repost from 2022, 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.