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2 * 100 bounty: Minecraft prime checker
What it says on the tin.
I offer 100 reputation to whoever can make a valid prime checker using:
levers as input (ON = 1, OFF = 0), representing a binary number
redstone lamp as output (ON = prime, OFF = not prime)
I offer another 100 reputation if th...
Pokemon Type chart (and dual type chart)
I'm always forgetting Pokemon type matchups. This is a challenge to print the pokemon type chart! As a bonus you also have to print the dual type chart.
You can print the table in any format you like so long as it's 2D, and lists all of the types, on bot...
Guys, can we stop randomly butchering popcons? The showcase is on-topic (per the latest discussions on this stuff) because human evaluation/subjectivity is not required to determine if an answer is valid (not counting the factoid)
Self-Host a Language
Your task is to write a program in your language that outputs a program that supports a minimal subset of that language for use. That minimal subset is based on our definition of a programming language. This means that the program you generate must support input and output. ...
[WIP] Translate Baby-talk!
When babies open their mouths, they're not just spewing gibberish. They're actually talking in a highly advanced, adult-proof cipher...
The Baby-talk Cipher
When a baby talks, it may look something like gogooa gagooook aagaaoooy
Each string-seperated section represen...
Compare that to Mona Lisa where a human is required to determine if a image looks like the Mona Lisa
I'll write up an answer later but the fact that I even have to makes me pretty upset. One minute everyone's like "we should keep popcons" and the next they're tripping over themselves to lynch one of the best popcons we've had
I was all for lynching bad popcons but we seem to finding excuses to get rid of them all even though that isn't what we agreed on
And for most questions we can deem them invalid more or less objectively. In the case of code golf humans are pretty good at counting whitespace and comparing standard deviation of the byte count although we don't think of it that way
I think the confusing/decisive part is where to draw the line between a "requirement" and a "goal." For example: a challenge with the "requirement" that the code output a pretty image is subjective. On the other hand, you could make a challenge with the "requirement" to output an image, with the "goal" of making it as pretty as possible.
I know it's not I'm just a bad mood because I don't like rules lawyering. Sorry
The bottom line is the only thing required to determine if an answer achieve's the showcase's "goal" is does number of snippets == votes and are they of the correct length.
For Tweetable Art and all these other popcons you mentioned there's some aspect of subjectivity involved in verifying the goal. Not here
The reason why it's worth looking at it from this perspective is that the main real problem with popcons was bad invalid cheaty answers
Now you seem to be using the old argument that popularity contests are objective because see, the number of votes is quantitative and no one can dispute it.
The showcase's objective validity means that it won't suffer from this. Mona Lisa's subjective validity means that it would and did
@PhiNotPi Ah, but that's more just wording. At its core there's nothing stopping the showcase from being objective while these other popcons had very subjective goals that were inherent in the spec
Again, ask Helka. He's a very good challenge writer and if there are any wording issues that stop what I'm arguing from holding true he'll fix them
@feersum You keep coming back to this which tells me you're either not understanding my argument or not really caring. Please tell me whether it's the former or the latter before I explain why these are very different for the third time
...also I should mention that I'm okay with leaving the Showcase open, if I can put a finger on what exactly makes it a better pop-con than others. My meta post has perhaps painted me as having a much more inflexible stance than I really do.
@quartata I wrote an answer as I think it's important to have a debate about this. I really didn't mean to upset anyone and it hurts to see that I have. I really don't want to see popularity contests off topic. I think this one is off topic based on our current scope (which is a separate question from whether it should be). I think a lot of different problems are tangled together here, and have been for a long time. Although untangling them will be painful I think it's worth it.
Let's say the challenge were "Tweetable Image" and the spec were "make three functions, for RGB, each under 140 bytes" without anything to imply that answers were required to look artsy. Would you consider that on-topic?
That's the problem: we've all lost sight of why we wanted objectivity
@PhiNotPi That would still be a gray area I think. The showcase is unique in that the contents of the snippets aren't what's being "judged" necessarily. But here in order to determine minimum effort we'd still have to look inside the functions
Anyways back on topic. Just to reaffirm my point here were the criteria I had in mind for Mona Lisa
Perhaps what makes the Showcase different, is that (1) the "requirements" were laid out as clearly separate from anything subjective, with nothing implying that an answer must be interesting to be valid. (2) In some sense, there are two "goals" to the challenge: add as many snippets as you can (objective) and add snippets worth showcasing (subjective).
Personally I think with that type of image output challenge the "looks close to the target" shouldn't be a validity criterion (like the objective of a golf challenge) but part of what constitutes sufficient effort (like the requirement to at least try to golf in a golf challenge)
The fact that you can't objectively say whether an image looks "similar enough" is like the fact that you can't say objectively whether a golf is "golfed enough"
@quartata I think that's somewhat an issue, actually, because it very much blends the distinction between the "requirements" and the "goals" of a challenge, since it leads to any challenge with (only) a subjective goal, also have a subjective requirement (which is the implicit requirement to make effort towards the goal).
And so I think perhaps one key part of the Showcase, is the fact that there's an objective component of the goal, which is to write X number of snippets.
Golf works really well as a scoring method, because it's entirely separate from the purpose of the program. Validity: gives the correct output. Score: number of bytes. With judging an image, the score and the validity are measured the same way. I'd like to see it work, but it's always going to be messier than golf, and take more effort to design a good challenge
- Language meets our requirements for a programming language - If the current score of the answer is n, then there must be n snippets of code in that language - The snippets must be of length n where n in Z and 0 < n <= current score - No two snippets can have the same length
Non-observable program requirements
The validity of a program should depend on things that can be observed when the program is treated as a black box. Examples are data written to standard output or error streams, drawing on the screen, file operations, memory usage, and runtime. Non-observable ...
Here the validity doesn't depend even on that! The contents of the snippet are completely irrelevant for validity. Now voters can vote based on it but they don't have to.
Ideally we would have separate voting mechanisms for "this answer is well written" and "this answer should have a high score". Until then pop con is always going to be an odd compromise. However, it's a compromise I'm glad we have, even if it's hard to get right
@quartata Take your time. Even though I've written an opposing answer I want the best possible answer for the other side too. Otherwise there's more chance we'll have to keep revisiting whichever decision is made.
Concerning Helka Homba specifically: a lot of the challenges are deliberately pushing the boundaries of our scope, and finding ways in which it can be extended. This is a huge service to the community. Finding that some are off topic is a natural consequence of this exploration, and I don't see it as a bad thing.
My main motivation is that I love the answers on the showcase and I want the answerers on it to continue to benefit from their work on it. If the showcase is locked they won't get upvotes.
So our disagreement is that I think popularity contests are supposed to have a winning criterion/goal that voters are supposed to reward answers that do a good job achieving, and @quartata does not believe such a goal is necessary?
Our goal should instead be to focus on making sure that popcon answers are of high quality. If bringing subjective criteria into the valifity mix prevents that then minimalist objective criteria are better. the showcase is unique in that it still works with that
I feel like any pop-con has an implicit "goal" of writing interesting answers, just as Math Art (regardless of whether there is any requirement to make it artsy) would have an implicit goal of making interesting image. And so... perhaps what makes the Showcase different is that it proposes an alternative goal which is objective (write as many snippets as possible) in addition to the implicit goal.
Although... I think there is ground to say that the current wording is explicit about wanting answers to be interesting. That may simply be a wording thing.
> All the snippets will be written in the same programming language and attempt to showcase its obscure or interesting features.
@feersum In any other case I'd agree -- most popcons need that sort of goal I might not be doing the best job of articulating it but the showcase really doesn't seem to.
@PhiNotPi As I said earlier ask Helka. That is mostly wording
Really we need Helka's input before we do stuff like that
@trichoplax If you could move this conversation to a new room and superping Helka in there that would be nice
So you want to keep it because the answers so fare seem to have OK quality. On the other hand, it sets a bad example for new users who think that "make the coolest thing" is an acceptable question.
@feersum I want to krep it because compared to the tons of other issues popcons have the showcase up until this point has been trotting along without issue for 2 years.
@quartata Helka's pingable in here if you want to. I'm loathe to move this to another room as it's a conversation that seems very relevant to the whole community (and there isn't any other conversation that it seems to be conflicting with). You could bookmark it once it's finished if you want people to be able to find it easily
So perhaps the real reason we need rules on popcons is because most people write shitty questions, and we want to have a rule-based reason for closing them.
Guys, can we stop randomly butchering popcons? The showcase is on-topic (per the latest discussions on this stuff) because human evaluation/subjectivity is not required to determine if an answer is valid (not counting the factoid)
I recently revisited the following classic challenge: Showcase your language one vote at a time. The gist of the challenge is as follows:
An answer is a set of program snippets, each with a unique length.
The maximum length and maximum number of snippets are given by the answer's current vote ...
Regarding alternatives to the Showcase as it is, might it be possible to set up language-specific showcases, like how we have tips questions for specific languages?
I'm not convinced we need a separate showcase at all. PPCG itself is a showcase. If you're intrigued by a language, you can always search for answers that use it.
@Dennis That doesn't provide you with a way to see the best/most interesting answers. The Mathematica showcase demonstrates the language far better than a search for Mathematica-language answers would.
More to the point if our rules are going to lead to us getting rid of a wildly successful popcon with almost no issues until now then we need to change our rules because they suck. They're not helping us eliminate bad questions they're just causing fights
The goal of the popcon discussions was to preserve site quality on account of all the bad popcon questions and answers that got upvoted into oblivion. On the other hand there's almost universal agreement that the showcase rocks. There should be no "unfortunate victims" -- that just means we're doing something wrong
And I think the showcase definitely fits into what we'd like the scope to be
So now we just need to figure out how to make it happen
@quartata Tailoring our rules around the premise that a specific challenge should remain open – especially if we'd close new challenges that are only vaguely similar – is hardly a good idea.
I'm gonna have to take a break from this (2-hour-long?) discussion because I have real-world work to do. Anyways, if people do end up deciding to keep the Showcase open (as on-topic and not too broad), then ideally we will formulate a list of guidelines that are precise enough, so that we can apply them to all popcons to determine whether they should be opened or closed. The meta thread "guidelines on opening/closing popcons" never came close to creating what the title claims.
Also I'd like to mention that we have 0 consensus and therefore 0 rules on this. We can't agree on anything and I think that's because we've lost sight of what we want
At this point most of the closed popcons are just people randomly closing. That's not really an issue because most of the popcons getting nuked were shit but now that this behavior is threatening a good popcon we need to do something
@quartata TBH, the closure of the showcase is the logical conclusion of a lot of the previous action against popcons. It's one of the main reasons I made this meta thread: there's some very obvious dissonance/inconsistency in the community, and we need to iron it out.
I've identified that the showcase is in a certain category of popcons that can't possibly cause site quality issues -- they have a minimalist objective goal and voting has no real strings attached. If others exist they are also good -- and the definition is rather general so I am sure others exist
Personally, I think that Zekka's answer to the Meta question of what we should do to attract more golfers is actually pretty relevant here. Particularly the portion under the bolded "I'm not going to listen to your suggestion until you engage in a semantics argument with me." point. If we're too stringent on rules and requirements, we run the risk of turning away valuable contributions and contributors.
But it works. Even if I can't convince you why you can't deny that there is a difference in the quality of the showcase vs other popcons and that's the obvious difference
I'm definitely approaching this from an "if it aint broke don't nuke it" perspective
Ultimately all that matters is site quality. These rules were designed to uphold that -- if they're hindering that something needs to change
That's not the difference. If you can find something else that is the difference let me know. To me it is intuitively obvious why this goal is the difference but I understand that my brain is weird
@quartata (I really should have left already, but...) what I think would really help your case here is a list of additional examples. Basically "hard evidence" that having "a minimalist objective goal and voting has no real strings attached" is what makes a pop-con good. Consider doing this as you write up your meta answer.
We could have two tags, like human-judged for one with a narrow but difficult to automate judging goal, and popularity-contest for ones that are about wide-ranging creativity.
@PhiNotPi I'm not following the conversation but I think it's silly to close any question with say 100+ (or 200+) votes without overwhelming reason. That's like willfully destroying what makes our site great.
@muddyfish I've refreshed your chat profile but I still can't see the animation on mobile. I can't zoom in without freezing it, and using a physical magnifying glass doesn't show up any movement either.
2 * 100 bounty: Minecraft prime checker
What it says on the tin.
I offer 100 reputation to whoever can make a valid prime checker using:
levers as input (ON = 1, OFF = 0), representing a binary number
redstone lamp as output (ON = prime, OFF = not prime)
I offer another 100 reputation if th...
Pokemon Type chart (and dual type chart)
I'm always forgetting Pokemon type matchups. This is a challenge to print the pokemon type chart! As a bonus you also have to print the dual type chart.
You can print the table in any format you like so long as it's 2D, and lists all of the types, on bot...
[WIP] Translate Baby-talk!
When babies open their mouths, they're not just spewing gibberish. They're actually talking in a highly advanced, adult-proof cipher...
The Baby-talk Cipher
When a baby talks, it may look something like gogooa gagooook aagaaoooy
Each string-seperated section represen...
I recently revisited the following classic challenge: Showcase your language one vote at a time. The gist of the challenge is as follows:
An answer is a set of program snippets, each with a unique length.
The maximum length and maximum number of snippets are given by the answer's current vote ...
