Given the way the last task went (61 minutes late... arrgh!), you may want to amend the contract to allow a time extension if less than N valid entries are received (possibly with public hints/feedback...). Also, I agree that a mix of these harder tasks with "simple" are good... for the last couple rounds, just implementing was the challenge, it would be good for some (like printing the alphabet) where implementation was easy but optimization was the challenge.
-Goethe On Sun, 20 Jan 2008, Ian Kelly wrote: > I think the mathematical tasks may be tiring to some, so I'm going to > try something else this time. The third task for Brainfuck Golf is to > implement Unix sort. The input is to be read as a sequence of ASCII > lines, each terminated with a newline character (0x0A) and/or EOF > (0x00). The same lines are to be output in lexicographically sorted > order, each terminated by a newline character. The program can > either: > > (a) output each unique line the same number of times that it appears > in the input (i.e. just sort them); or > > (b) output each unique line exactly once (i.e. sort -u or sort | > uniq), which is worth 3 points. > > Note: the input lines never contain newline characters except as > terminators, and EOF will never appear in the input itself. > > -root >
