HHC 2017 RPL Programming contest information and results thread

[DavidM]

(09-18-2017 04:52 PM)Gene Wrote:  My goals were:

1) Get a "correct" answer - preferably within 1 digit in the least significant location entered.

2) Get as low a series of denominators as possible - no one wants to do 1/123509813459807 if possible.

3) Have a program that is as small as possible.

Those are hard to do without being in conflict, so that's why I tried the scheme in the contest... it was the third I had typed up. Not sure how to reward the programs given those criteria...

How would you have amended the scoring? While the specific weighting of factors may be debatable, I think you did a good job of modeling your goals. I was quite pleased to see a contest that didn't focus solely on program size as The Most Important Thing. You came up with a suitable problem that has multiple "correct" approaches, with some having a higher quality result than others. That, by itself, must have required some effort on your part.

I got as far as the simple version that I assume most participants got to initially, but hit a brick wall when trying to find the "secret sauce" for how to manipulate the terms to minimize the list (#2 in your list above, which for me was the most interesting part of the challenge).

That there is a wide range of scores for the participants is a good thing in my mind, as it implies that there isn't a single clever approach to the problem that was found by some subset of the participants. I would find that kind of outcome far less satisfying.