I've got an idea for a fun (!) challenge but it would be a little different from the ones I normally see on this site. The challenge would be to come up with an algorithm that solves the problem the best way and to implement it in code, which I would estimate taking a day or two to work on. The winner would be the program that generates the best output according to an objective criteria.
Would this sort of thing be welcome on this site?
(The following isn't the challenge I'm thinking of, but to give you an idea of scope.)
Compress Shakespeare.
Write a program that will take a text file containing English text and produce some program code that will reproduce the input text. I'm looking for algorithmic cleverness since no-one has yet developed a good general purpose compression algorithm.
Your program should work with any text file, but the winner will be the code that produces the shortest output from Shakespeare's hamlet, (link).