Before I'll say anything, let me mention that I'm glad there's no flaming at all going on about this and people basically just want to find a fair solution. That said....
First of all, someone needs to make a decision about which solutions will be valid for Autoedit. I still don't know which solution to upload. Second: is it illegal to test eof in Autoedit? The generic rules say input could be STDIN rather than a file. So while my 51 solution worked with testsuite 8, it would not work from STDIN. If it's *not* legal, then I think the rule in the generic rules should explicitly mention eof(STDIN) not working, because I'm not sure it's clear right now. Third and most importantly, I think we need a new rule for Perl Golfing. I propose that if a solution passes the testsuite two days (48 hours) or less before the end of the contest, then that solution is valid, even if someone finds edge cases afterwards. Why? Because (1) we have a globally distributed group of players, and if the test suite is changed 12 hours before the end of the contest, the Australians might sleep through it all, (2) A lot of people can't work all day every day so they'll maybe pick one day earlier in the week when they have lots of time to work on the contest, and then not check in until near the end, and (3) If the test suite is changed too near the end, you might not have time to fix it. (In this case, the fix was trivial (255->3e4 or whatever, but then Ton pointed out that the fix might be illegal.) and in other cases it might be the whole basis of your algorithm that needs to change.) I know this isn't completely "fair". Some people might be smart enough not to use solutions that don't allow edge cases, and then they are unfairly penalized for being careful. Still, if the vast majority of people don't see the problem, I think it's still right to use the test suite as the solution. That said, people should definitely try in the first few days of the contest to send in any edge cases that they find, and contest organizers should be careful to think of as many test cases as possible. Memory issues are probably tougher to deal with and will have to be decided on a case by case basis. My opinion on this particular contest is still that if the vast majority of people didn't realize the memory problem, then the contest shouldn't be judged that way. Even though careful Ton gets penalized, I don't know if it's fair to penalize every other player instead. Anyway, let's get over this problem and move to another contest. Um, after I've had time to get some sleep. -Amir __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
