Bear in mind @FlagAsSpam, that it is past midnight and my brain is a little fried from earlier illness, but would regular scoring by bytes not work here?
a) I'd rather remain in beta than artificially increase our challenge rate, as I don't think we have the corresponding increased activity of answerers either. b) if we do hit 10 I'm sure they'd look at the stats in detail and if 10% (or whatever) of the question volume are due to a single user, that's not good either
Introduction
Pareidolia: From Ancient Greek; παρα (para, “concurrent, alongside”) + εἴδωλον (eídōlon, “image”). The tendency to interpret a vague stimulus as something known to the observer, such as interpreting marks on Mars as canals, seeing shapes in clouds, or hearing hidden messages in mu...
why don't we schedule a weekly challenge jam where the only goal is to bat challenge ideas around. It could last several hours with the goal of everyone in attendance getting at least one new challenge into or out of sandbox, but no pressure or anything
I think we should post simple challenges (like this one today) more often. That wouls increase the number of challenges, and it also helps people get into code golf
I've been trying to find an algorithm to find a maximum vertex cycle cover of a directed graph $G$ — that is, a set of disjoint cycles which contain all the vertices in $G$, with as many cycles as possible. I know that the problem of finding a minimum vertex cycle cover, as well as finding a vert...
context is this challenge I sandboxed: meta.codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/8228/8478 ... the problem is quite trivial for distinct list elements but it's a lot trickier otherwise
@quintopia uh, yes. I think you should formulate it on vertices though
@LuisMendo I considered cstheory but on either of them I don't think I have sufficient academic background in the field to be sure that it would be appropriate
Write a function or program that outputs the number of each type of element (vertex, edge, face, etc.) of an N-dimensional hypercube.
As an example, the 3 dimensional cube has 1 cell (i.e. 1 3-dimensional cube), 6 faces (i.e. 6 2-dimensional cubes), 12 edges (i.e. 12 2-dimensional cubes) and 8 v...
Chat mini-challenge: given a number n, return the first n numbers of the Kolakoski sequence: a(n) is length of n-th run; a(1) = 1; sequence consists just of 1's and 2's.
@Lembik oh well I wasn't gonna post on cstheory. I can't tell if this is sufficiently "research level" and I certainly haven't looked into it at research level myself
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 everything right (like with Patch the Image), the challenges still attract close votes. The issue is begin...
Introduction
A known fact is that Jon Skeet can code Perl and make it look like Java. In this challenge you will try to do something similar.
Challenge
Write a piece of code of any length that can be executed without any errors/exceptions in two different languages. Your program can take input...
I'm looking for Chuck Norris Facts style answers. In case anyone is curious, this question was inspired by Jon's own comment to this question.
EDIT: If you're into cryptography, you may enjoy these facts.
Now with official sanction from the powers that be!
Consider two displacements, one of magnitude 6 m and another of magnitude 8 m. What angle between the directions of this two displacements give a resultant displacement of magnitude (a) 14 m, (b) 2 m, and (c) 10 m.
An idea for a series of challenges: Choose some arbitrary language and search for tasks where this language is particularly good (at golfing). Then the challenge is implementing those programs in other languages as sshort as possible.
Questions like this make me sad: It's like an unintentional rep cartel between posters of easy questions, golfing language users who write super-short answers with built-ins, and HNQ voters who pile tons of upvotes onto both of these.
And it's not the rep that bothers me, but the way these drown out other questions and answers, especially to the HNQ audience.
It's not really anyone's fault, just a behavior that emerges from the system.
@trichoplax On the one hand it would solve that problem, but on the other hand those who come via HNQ might probably stay around more if they can participate. (e.g. in voting)
@trichoplax I suspect drive-by voters are in part to blame, but i'm not sure. It could just be that people on site really like seeing short answers. Or, that each individual voter wants to upvote even if they collectively think having many such answers on topic isn't good.
@xnor Yes PPCG votes may be the cause of this... Also if a question is easy the answers come in quickly and sometimes the answers might be what convinces a voter that it's a good question...
Keep it
There's nothing wrong specifically with popularity-contest (indeed it is a good scoring criteria for several popular kinds of challenges, such as image-processing). The main issue is that people misunderstand that popularity-contest does not make your challenge exempt from the standard r...