Questions tagged [challenges]
For questions about challenges on the main site
69 questions
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What do we do with an abandoned challenge that requires the author's participation?
When the author of a challenge makes a commitment to a challenge posted (e.g. "The timing will be done on my machine") but then clearly gives up on the challenge (e.g. by attempting to ...
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Equivalence between strictly increasing integer sequences and decision problems
I have noticed that sequence questions are often looking at strictly increasing integer sequences. For these types of sequences, the sequence task of outputting the values in the sequence is largely ...
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Fast and Golfiest Season 2 Looking for Advice
Season 2 is coming! Season 1 was fun and relatively well-received, but the main problem was that the scoring system is very broken. Hence I'm looking for advice about how to improve the system so that ...
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Is splitting a challenge into multiple categories a good way to have an optional difficulty without bonuses?
Sometimes, in a challenge you might want to create some variations. You might want to encourage some extra constraint or limitation, but don't want to obligate everyone to attempt the extra difficulty,...
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Repost "Word stays a word after taking away a letter"?
"Word stays a word after taking away a letter. Repeat" was a massively downvoted question, not because of challenge, but mainly because it was badly written.
Personally, I think that the ...
- 9,468
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Should we rehash Add A Language To A Polyglot?
Add a language to a polyglot was fun while it lasted. However, it's kinda stagnated due to the difficulty of running all the languages. I propose that we repost this challenge, maybe with stricter ...
- 44.2k
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Advent of code golf?
Every year, during December, our cousin site, Advent of Code goes live, hosting a coding challenge every day from the 1st of December to the 24th of December. There have been various attempts for ...
- 50.3k
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Are parts of challenges allowed to be posted on their own?
Suppose there is a challenge that is rather hard, and has few answers. Is it OK to post a new challenge that is actually a part of the bigger and harder challenge? Of course, attributing the original ...
- 18.3k
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Policy on answering challenges with cumbersome I/O
We've probably all seen new users ask questions with cumbersome I/O rules, like mandatory taking the input by reading separated lines of STDIN and outputting to STDOUT to give an example.
In those ...
- 131k
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On "golf this for me" tips questions
Sometimes we get tips questions from a first-time contributor asking for help golfing a particular piece of code that they wrote. Often these question don't fare so well. Can we do anything here?
...
- 147k
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I asked a word question that has run away with me?
Easiest WordSearch
I've asked a crossword related question thats been on my mind for quite a while. I've made various edits from suggestions in the comments. I don't think I can adjust the question ...
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How to request clarifications when the challenge poster has left the site?
Recently, I began to attempt to answer this highly upvoted and answered question, before realising that, by taking the length of the input as an input would allow me to greatly reduce my code. However,...
- 50.3k
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Can I redo the Solve Rubik's Cube challenge?
The challenge Solve Rubik's cube has a lot of flaws:
Arbitrary limits:
(say, max. 5 seconds on your machine and less than 1000 moves)
Cumbersome input format:
The input is in the format ...
- 13.9k
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How should a challenge allow floating point imprecision to be ignored?
I wrote a challenge about sampling a probability distribution: Sample the Pareto Distribution
This probability distribution is defined over the real numbers. However, submissions do not have access ...
- 42.1k
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Can we revive The Programming Language Quiz?
status-completed
The Programming Language Quiz was a Cops and Robbers challenge posted 2 years ago, where users were challenged to create obfuscated Hello, World! programs, and others tried to ...
- 50.3k
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Does everything have to be original? [duplicate]
Many kolmogorov challenges are closed as duplicates of the Rickroll challenge. ascii-art challenges are closed as duplicates of various other challenges that are somewhat similar. code-golf challenges ...
- 46.5k
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Should question/challenge titles always be in English?
There's some dispute over this challenge's title. The author originally created it as "Многочлены Чебышёва". A user edited it to "Chebyshev Polynomials" (an imperfect translation, ...
user45941
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Default / Recommended Ruling on counting Implementation-Variants of Languages as different?
In my most recent challenge, which was scored by number of languages in a polyglot the following question came up:
Do different [..] implementations of the same language count as
different ...
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Is it OK to post restricted challenges where only some people may participate?
Recently a Friendly Challenge was posted on Code Review Meta where PPCG challenged Code Review.
The post on Code Review Meta says:
I am planning on hosting a King of the Hill challenge Programming ...
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How can we get more feedback on our Sandbox questions?
Often, I have proposed a question to the sandbox and I never got any feedback on it; sometimes, I never got feedback until I had already posted the question. I want a way to fix this. I want Sandbox ...
- 1,329
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Who has the final say on a challenge?
For the mod election questionnaire, I asked about a hypothetical situation:
A new-ish user posts a well-posed challenge that quickly gets many
answers. An hour later, they edit in a restriction ...
- 147k
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Suspecting cheating at competitions
Once in a while, a new user posts an immaculately-written challenge with test cases formatted like
1 ≤ m ≤ 10000
1 ≤ n ≤ 100
SAMPLE INPUT 10 9 8
SAMPLE OUTPUT 1
Maybe they say they'...
- 147k
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Second iteration of a challenge
I wrote a challenge, I was concerned it would need some fine tuning, but was not able to get anyone on board to help me test. So I posted it to the main and it turned out while it was pretty fun it ...
Wheat WizardMod
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What to do about widely disliked questions that don't technically break any rules?
Sometimes a question is posted that widely disliked (often due to being too easy, or being excessively arbitrary, or playing around in a space that's been mostly comprehensively covered without ...
user62131
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Good examples of popularity contest challenges
popularity-contest is a hard tag to create questions for. Its hard balance between vagueness and broadness. What are some good examples that other challenges should seek to emulate?
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Is the increased rep for challenge upvotes going to happen? [duplicate]
I have read on here that many several times it has be suggested that challenge upvotes count for more rep. Is that happening?
Increase reputation awarded for questions Is one place it was mentioned ...
user63187
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Announcing the PPCG Challenge-Writing Competition!
Most of us, I'm sure, come to this site either to solve delightfully tricky programming puzzles, or to see what insane golfs other members of our community have written.
However, now we ackgnowledge ...
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Should I delete a downvoted question?
Some times ago, I posted a question that is now -3. I got some good answers that helped me (and I accepted one of them), but the -3 score hints that the question is not good. Should I delete it?
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Reposts of answer-chaining challenges
The reason that we don't allow reposts is because the same answers will be copied from the first challenge and the original can still be answered. But what about answer-chaining challenges? Those are ...
- 9,397
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How can I use a list of English words in a challenge?
I would like to make a challenge that involves English words. Because we want all challenges to be self-contained, I'd have to stuff the huge file into a code block, and let people copy-paste it to ...
- 13.9k
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Is a double popularity contest a bad idea?
I have an Idea for a set of four challenges. The first round is a double popularity contest. Specifically two questions each linking each other with identical requirements but different judging ...
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If a challenge gives a reference implementation, do we have to ban the language the reference is written in?
I recently stumbled upon this challenge where the OP gives a non-golfed reference implementation in C++. This makes it a no-brainer to solve the challenge with C++ by just golfing the reference.
Is ...
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Downvoting Questions on Hold
What is the current community opinion on this action. While certainly a downvoted is a very clear way of leaving direct feedback. I feel that downvoting a question that is already on hold is almost ...
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Accepting answers in challenges
In any code-golf question, there is the possibility that the OP wants to accept an answer that is not the shortest. I have not heard of it being possible for mods to change the accepted answer. ...
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How could "Crash your favorite compiler" be edited to be on-topic?
I recently found the closed Crash your favorite compiler question and was wondering how a type of question like this could be changed to fit the requirements of a challenge question as outlined in the ...
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Real Coding Skill [duplicate]
Most puzzles and questions asked on CodeGolf are interesting and challenging. However, usually the answers that win are created from pre-fabricated languages designed for golfing code.
This seems ...
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Hand-crafting a PDF
Inspired by this answer, I thought an interesting challenge would be to golf a PDF file. PDF files are based on the PostScript language, so I thought this might be acceptable as a programming ...
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Flag question comments for deletion when suggestion is implemented?
Related to Flag comments for deletion when suggestion is implemented?.
The above question specifically addresses obsolescence flagging and deletion of comments to answers. What about the same ...
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Tag / challenge type proposal: Size coding [duplicate]
This question and proposal is different from this one, since this proposal includes a scoring mechanism that is vastly different from code-golf.
What is size coding?
Size coding as a form of ...
user42643
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Let's deliberate about [1p5]
Back in April 2011, @dmkcee announced the CodeGolf.SE First Periodic Premier Programming Puzzle Push. This proposal was so promising and interesting that even Jeff Atwood took note!
The 1p5 tag was ...
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When can challenges be reused?
I have noticed that some new sandbox posts are being shutdown as duplicates of other much older posts. There is nothing wrong with that.
But I think there should be a time limit after which ...
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The state of the underhanded tag
I recently looked at the underhanded tag and noticed that all 3 of the newest questions are closed as "Too Broad". From our new rules for popularity contests and the code-trolling tag being off-topic ...
- 5,090
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Can we have a different Put On Hold message?
put on hold as unclear what you're asking by Xxx, Yyy, Zzz 1 hour ago
Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s ...
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What should we do about questions that get asked that are already Sandboxed?
So, sometimes, I see questions that are posted in the sandbox, but have been posted in main by another user. For example, this question yielded 242 rep to a user who did not originally post it in the ...
- 11.2k
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The state of the popularity contest tag
Recently, there's been a strong push against popularity-contest challenges. This post sums up the general feelings of the community pretty well, in my opinion. Even when challenge authors do ...
user45941
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What constitutes programming for the purposes of this site?
According to our Help Center (emphasis mine),
Programming Puzzles & Code Golf is for programming contests and challenges.
Sounds simple enough, and 99 times out of 100 it is. But there are ...
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What should we do with old challenges no longer on topic?
During discussion of this meta question, it was noted that our current rules are different from our historical rules. As a result some older challenges would be closed as off topic if posted now. ...
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Count question score toward tag badges
Related: Increase reputation awarded for questions
It has recently came to my attention that tag badges are only awarded based on answer votes. For a site like Stack Overflow, that makes sense, as ...
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On downvoting questions of users not in the know
Recently, I encountered this question where a user had posted a challenge to make an ArrayList and manipulate it in certain ways, very basically.
This poster obviously did not understand the site, ...
- 11.2k
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Increase reputation awarded for questions
It has come to my attention that the amount of reputation awarded for questions can be adjusted on a per-site basis. For example, Stack Apps awards +10 reputation for question upvotes. As you probably ...
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