Brad Greenlee wrote: > Here's a question of fair play: does each program have to work for any given > text file, or is it ok if it just works on the test cases presented by > tsanta? I can shorten my mid.pl by one stroke, and it still passes all the > tests, but it will eventually fail when the file reaches a certain size.
The programs should be "sound"; passing tsanta.pl is no guarantee. A program that failed on files longer than 100 lines, for instance, would certainly be disqualified. I propose that a panel of non-combatant Perl experts judge the leading entries. You can protect yourself against disqualification by making more than one entry. e.g. if you have a 100 and 101 stroke solution, and believe the 100 stroke solution is unsound, you are free to enter both; if the 100-stroke solution is disqualified, you will be given a final score of 101 (assuming that solution is sound). To take revenge on Santa, you might like to run a "Consolation Loophole Game", a no-holds barred game, where the *only* rule is that tsanta.pl prints "Hooray you passed". That game would allow some of the more surreal hacks that I have just witnessed. Santa.
