PopCons and Graphical Output

Question

Previously:

• How do we close questions without an objective validity criterion?
• Guidelines for posting and closing popularity contests
• Would "render the Mona Lisa in 1000 bytes" be on topic here?
• http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/34229/discussion-on-answer-by-dennis-guidelines-for-posting-and-closing-popularity-con

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We, as a community, still seem to be very divided on the concept of popularity-contest graphical-output challenges ... I'm not speaking about PopCons in general, just those that are specifically related to graphical output or artistic flair.

I had thought that we had this sorted out a few months ago, and came to the conclusion that challenges need an objective validity criterion in order to be allowed on this site -- that's where the "Guidelines..." Meta post linked above has, but unfortunately there's nothing close to consensus on that post, and most answers don't actually answer the question -- but given the reaction to Helka's recent "Cracked Soil" challenge, it seems that's not the case.

However ... just take a peek at the below ...

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Relevant challenges that were closed:

• https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/69232/paint-the-mona-lisa-in-1kb-of-code (deleted question, so you'll need privileges)
• Make the pattern from composition notebooks
• Tweetable Mathematical Art
• What time is it again?
• Warhol these pictures

Relevant challenges that were allowed:

• American Gothic in the palette of Mona Lisa: Rearrange the pixels
• Computer Generated Cracked Soil
• Computer Generated Textured Wall Paint
• Images with all colors
• Draw random black-and-white forest
• Generate Realistic Maps
• Paint by Numbers (using programming, not numbers)
• Patch the Image
• Force an Average on an Image
• MS Paint is underrated

Relevant challenges that were re-done to not be a PopCon, after pushback from the community:

• Paint Starry Night, objectively, in 1kB of code (the resultant challenge after the Mona Lisa one, above, was closed)

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Given all of the above, and the fact that this is still a very divisive topic, and the fact that we as site do not like subjectiveness, the question I'm posting to Meta is this:

What, definitively, constitutes an objective validity criterion when formulating a subjective artistic merit graphical-output popularity-contest challenge?

What, specifically, needs to be included in the challenge for the challenge to be on topic?

Answer 1

Popcons have needed to be popular

Note: This is simply my perspective on what has been happening, not what should be happening

We have a challenge writer, Helka Homba, who is quite popular in our community. He writes great challenges: They are interesting and easy to read. His questions each get about 20 votes (rough guess), and lots of answers.

His pop-con challenges are also popular. Whether it is by the virtue of his name being on the post, or because they are well-written, they become quite popular. Nearly all of the listed allowed challenges are written by him.

Now lets look at the disallowed challenges:

• Make the pattern, What time is it, Warhol: Unpopular (received few upvotes and few downvotes)
• Mona Lisa: This challenge was pretty popular, but was in the middle of a debate as to whether it should be allowed.
• Tweetable Mathematical Art: Immensely popular, but because it was clearly off-topic under our previous guidelines, it got closed later on

When judging whether or not to close, we, as imperfect humans, often appeal to whether or not we like the challenge. Challenges that are enjoyable to read/compete in are going to have less close votes. While our official guidelines have asked for objectivity, we are more likely to think that a challenge is objective if we liked the challenge in the first place

Therefore, if we take a stance, we should apply those guidelines regardless of the popularity/enjoyability of the post.

(All of this said, my personal opinion is that the majority of the challenges listed above are on-topic for this site. To be more clear: I'm not saying that Helka's posts are off-topic; I think they should remain open. However, if we are making exceptions to the rule because of his name, we should stop)

Answer 2

Explicit distinction between objective and subjective rules

First of all, I do agree with Nathan Merrill's post. I'd like to add following point:

When writing down the rules for the challenge, the author should make an explicit distinction between

• objective rules: Things that can be objectively be measured (by a "dumb" computer). These rules form/include the objective validity criterion
• subjective rules: The goal of the challenge, which some submissions do achieve better than others. (The heart of the pop-con, the artistic merit that should be achieved)

And both those sets of rules should also be declared as the objective or subjective rules. This distinction should be clearly present in the challenge.

Example: As an example of this I'd like to refer to my patch-the-image challenge, as I wrote this challenge after some of those mentioned discussions, and I very carefully tried to implement the points that were established.

The objective rules were just that outside of the given area, the image must remain unchanged, and that the program may only read from the outside area.

The subjective rules said that the inside area should be filled, such that it is as unnoticeable as possible, basically as a list of voting suggestions.
There is no way how this could be judged objectively. Some of the answers did a relatively bad job (my personal opinion), some of the answers did a very good job at achieving this. This is where we need the judgment of the people who are reading the challenge, and what makes this a popularity-contest.

Answer 3

They should still follow our rules

(No this is not about any specific pop-con, I'm just putting this here)

If you go to "Ask a Question" on main, you'll see two main rules that answers should follow:

1. A clear specification of what constitutes a correct submission, so that it is possible to indisputably decide whether an entry is valid or not. Test cases are highly encouraged.
2. An objective primary winning criterion, so that it is possible to indisputably decide which entry should win.

So pop-cons fulfill #2 but #1 is where new users go wrong. Here are some hypothetical questions (both are bad, but one is better):

Write a program to add A and B, most votes wins

Write a program to output a randomly drawn goat, most votes wins

Okay, so it's pretty clear which one is more on-topic, but here's my stance:

    Pop-cons are only a winning criteria, judge the question's on-topicness, regardless of the pop-con tag.

Some examples of on-topic pop-cons would be:

• Make your language unusable – it could very well be a code-golf competition, but pop-con encourages creativity in the answers, "creativity" in the output isn't bad, but in many cases it can become a way for loopholes to open
• Draw an Image as a Voronoi Map – Answers can be objectively specified whether they are correct, or invalid. Downvotes shouldn't be what make the specification.

But what's brought up is that there is a specific (objective) task that answers must do. Pop-con can be used for answers to creatively solve the problem, and have voting descide the best solution, but that's no excuse for not having an objective specification for the task.

In conclusion: the task to be done should be clear, an answer can be objectively measured whether or not it fullfills the question's criteria without requiring downvotes to enforce rules. Subjectivity is perfectly fine as long as there is still some sort of objective specification