My best attempt at a bad pun for the style of golf I described in my "Alternatives"
mail:
Perl vaulting.
OK, it's bad. But what I'm really wondering is what other people think of having
non-standard golfing contests sometimes. In addition to the "variety is the spice of
life" benefit, we could also have contests that would allow more opportunities for
newbies, or teams, or whatever. People had talked about tag team golf (where a player
would be required to make at least one score reduction in a hole before passing it to
the other player), although there's issues in making sure people play fair.
Another thing I just thought of: give players a choice of five different programs:
winner is the lowest score for two of them. (Maybe one of three would be more fair for
people's sanity.)
Yet another: I know I've been interested in significantly bigger programs (where, say,
a winner might be 100 strokes), which would probably exercise different algorithmic
and stroke-shaving muscles than most of what we've played so far. (Admittedly, it may
be hard to predict beforehand what programming problem will yield the right length
solutions.) In all the holes we've played so far, things that took more than three or
four strokes could almost always be ignored. I think that's why we've never seen
things like (?{...}) in winning solutions -- it's five characters just to start the
code. OTOH, if you've got 100 strokes total, then those five strokes aren't as big a
deal, and might make a big difference in the overall game.
The only problem I foresee with these and other alternatives to the current contests
is that there will be a learning curve for the players and referees. OTOH, if we want
Perl Golfing to last more than another few months, I think we'll need some added
diversity.
Amir Karger
