16 replies to this topic

[ZekeDragon]

Well, since two other people wanted this to happen, I figured I might as well start one. I did the "Ten Lines or Less" challenge, but there really wasn't any winner or loser, it was more of just to see if you could accomplish it or not, and I honestly don't think it was that good of an idea. Instead, I wanted to see people really express themselves through code, and I think that things like the UVa Online Judge, Sphere Online Judge, and Project Euler are great very small projects to judge your programming ability by. These sorts of programs are not hard, but they do require using at least a little bit of that grey matter between your ears and give you enough variability to see how other people would solve problems. Assuming Jordan doesn't think I'm an enormous fa**ot for making this contest and delete this, we could, potentially, have some fun!

With this, I hope to make it so people can see real source code from all sorts of other languages, performing all sorts of other tasks. The source code can be in any language of your choice, but it's preferable that you make it cross-platform, so that more people can compile it and learn from it. This is, however, not a requirement.

Since this is a contest, and contests need winners, I had to come up with a way to make this contests method of determining a winner both fair and biased in my favor neutral. As such, I think the best way to do this would be to have Jordan decide the winner, and then the winner of the contest decide the next weeks contest, however this represents two obvious problems. First, Jordan may not appreciate having this responsibility simply thrust upon him; second, the winner of the last contest may simply vanish for a few days leaving everyone else hanging without something to do that week. So here's how to do it... next week, during the next contest, every entrant will vote on a previous weeks winner, but they can't vote for themselves! This works like so:

//POST BY VSWE:

Okay here's my Week Y Entry:

  http://vswe.codecall.net/contestentries/WeekYEntry.zip


My vote for Week X is:

    Andrew G.


[insert smiley here]

Something similar to that, just convey that "Here's my entry, and this is my vote for last weeks winner". You cannot vote for yourself, but you are otherwise allowed to vote for anybody. This I think is the fairest way, but don't take it personally if no one votes for your code (like what I think will happen to me a lot)! This should be seen as a chance to learn and improve, which was the whole point of CodeCall anyway, right?

The winner of Week X in the previous scenario is decided at the end of Week Y, or the beginning of Week Z, when all the votes had been tallied.

You may, of course, vote for someone without making an entry of your own! I can't make this a poll, obviously, since there'll be more than one on this thread, so you'll have to comment. Anyway, the winner gets mad +rep's from me and anyone else who'd volunteer them, and may choose the next contest, or in 2 days time/at their choice, let me/someone else decide the next one.

The first contest is here, go my heathens and make this program happen!

[Hignar]

Hmmm, I'd usually shy away from these things but that problem has stirred some interest in me. I'll give it a go!

[BlaineSch]

Is this more of a math problem or a programming problem? lol

I might give it a go, when is this "week" over?

[WingedPanther]

It looks interesting... this one's a bit nasty :)

[kresh7]

i cant open the page xD
UVa Online Judge is the server down or what

[relapse]

This should be fun.

[brownhead]

I love it :), only suggestion I have is that each contest should have a separate thread (possibly linked to this one). That way we can use the poll system to tally up votes, it will also eliminate the confusion that's sure to develop when there is forty posts in this thread and buried somewhere in there is the contest description for the current week.

[ZekeDragon]

People could start a new thread for each contest, but they'd have to know to put a poll for the last week on each one. This one still doesn't have a poll since there wasn't a previous week. :)

Anyway, I remember Jordan mentioning the possibility of a sub-forum for contests, challenges, and other types of code things. Not sure how that's going with the mods though, I have no idea if that went anywhere or not. Oh, and this week ends on the same day of the following week at the same time as the initial contest post was put up, for whatever time and day that is in your timezone (So, for me, it would be Wed. Sep. 23, at 01:56).

[TkTech]

One comment; All contest dates and times should be based on the forum time, which is visible near the end of the site. Just makes it easy for everyone :)

[brownhead]

Curse my highschool level math skills.. Has anybody found a good explanation and implementation of a ray-box intersection?

[ZekeDragon]

@TkTech: Well the only times basis I can see here is on the bottom of each page, which is GMT -7, or PST. If you want the time for the end of this contest based on GMT, it's 08:56 on the same day. The contest ends at precisely the same time everywhere on the earth. :P

[Termana]

TkTech - The time shown at the bottom of each page is your own timezone that you set in your profile settings. For instance mine says:

All times are GMT +9.5. The time now is 12:24 PM.