hacker.org

I am only able to get this down to 34 instructions! I just can't see any better way to do it, but I will bang my head against this some more. I seem to be having a hard time getting it to iterate exactly 20 times without adding a lot of instructions to it, not to mention conditionally doing ANYTHING is a pain.

However, look at the dates of the people solving it, an overwhelming number of them solved it in the last two weeks, and back in August, September, there would be up to a month between solves. Very strange!

I get the impression a lot more people have recently started using the site, which is a good thing!

This site was recommended in the most popular German computer magazine c't about one month ago. Therefore many Germans (me too) joined this forum within the last weeks and started solving challenges.
And the magazine said that everyone who solved more than 50 challenges should apply for a job there

I am also here because of this artikel, but I think 50 challenges are to easy.

I am from Austria and don't read c't very often, but in fact a German friend of mine who has subscribed to c't told me about this site a few weeks ago because of the article. Many of the nicknames you see contain German words, so the article is probably really the reason for huge amount of new members.

But yes, I agree to snibril, solving 50 challenges doesn't proove really _that_ much.

It would be interesting to see graphs of user counts.

I joined the site over a year ago, following an obscure link from a go problems site also run by adum. At the time there were less puzzles and no challenges; I solved Runaway, decided Modulo was impenetrable, had fun solving Mortal Coil mostly by hand, and then forgot about the site completely.

It was still in my bookmarks, though, so I came back a few months ago, found the challenges, and got totally hooked again. Since then I've even made some progress in Modulo... I need to get back to Mortal Coil, but the program I was using to solve it is stuck on a laptop whose power supply I have lost. All I have access to at the moment is a primitive brute-force solver which it was derived from...

I'd like to see more people working on the puzzles, rather than just the challenges. I think the overall user rankings are a bit deceptive because a lot of people just haven't even tried some of the puzzles.

I solved the challenge but it wasn't easy, I guess there are more challenges ahead of this that require you to get it down to 21 instructions.

I was the first person to beat the small word HVM puzzle but after I beat it, adum made it harder, and now a lot of these newer challenges would probably take me many days or weeks to do instead of just hours. I think I had just beaten runaway robot when the challenges came out and the site got redesigned.

theStack wrote:But yes, I agree to snibril, solving 50 challenges doesn't proove really _that_ much.

I'm from Germany as well and I've also joined after reading the article in c't magazine (which is, by the way, an absolutely outstanding technical magazine, and if you're a non-German speaking nerd there's your reason to envy us ;-).

I've also taken special notice of that remark that put the bar to 50 solved challenges, but that's pretty lame. I'd rather set the bar to beating tails in terms of total score...

sigi wrote:I'd rather set the bar to beating tails in terms of total score...

Or even on one puzzle... I really need competitors...

In fact, there were fewer challenges at that time. According to this page, there were only 91 when Allo won the first T-shirt. And there were no those "Didactic" challenges. So, solving 50 challenges was much harder than now.

mmm...some person hve they opini's...

gfoot wrote:I'd like to see more people working on the puzzles, rather than just the challenges. I think the overall user rankings are a bit deceptive because a lot of people just haven't even tried some of the puzzles.

I agree, it's a pity that there are no separate rankings for challenges and puzzles! So people that are not that much interested in puzzles (I have to admit I'm also much more interested in challenges, I've only tried around with solving some Runaway Robot levels so far), but solve more of the challenges are ranked unnecessarily low.

All puzzles, including the Challenges, have their own independent tables, so you can just look at the rankings for challenges, if that's all you're interested in. You're missing out though, there's something satisfying about the puzzles, when you can progressively improve your algorithm for solving the same kind of puzzle until it's really super-fast.

Maybe the separate ranking tables should also be displayed on a page together somewhere, so you can see the top ten at each event, all on one page.

Something else I've been interested in from time to time is how other people are progressing - when the rankings change on the main page, whether somebody has just solved a challenge or something. It mostly applies to challenges because the puzzles already have the weekly high scores, which shows recent activity quite well anyway.

shrug...
I think you guys are too focused on ranking. It's a warm cozy feeling to be on the top of course but it wears off at some time. And after you solve some puzzles and get to high level you would take a break to catch up on a project or social life and when you come back it's not the same. There is more satisfaction in "I got it!" feeling , at least for me. And 50 challenges for a job is rather low - tails did about 60 in 2 days I think.

the ranking fails anyway somehow. sometimes i just drop 20 ranks a day. i used to be on 30 and am on 90 now

wot`s your name