* Ton Hospel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2003-09-03 09:49]:
> Having said that, if an important new edge case is discovered close to
> the end, I'd rather extend the deadline. We could make this a formal rule:
> A contest end may never be before latest testsuite+48 hours.
I like that idea. For those who didn't realize that more than 255
substitutions were possible and weren't informed by the test suite, that would
have given an extra day or two. I agree, though, that golfers really should be
responsible for understanding the issues involved and maybe also generating
(and submitting) their own pathological tests.
> For the record, tybalt89 retracted his 47 and submitted a 49 instead when
> this issue was discovered. The last day he most likely didn't try for
> multiplier based solutions anymore. So this cost him at least 2 strokes.
> Even if we retroactively accept his 47, he lost almost a day.
I noticed that! In fact, it was his retraction that made me take a closer look
at my own solution and try to come up with something to break it. That wasn't
hard, since at that point I was silly enough not even to realize that more than
-80- substitutions were possible! I know, pretty dumb :-) Whatever happens
with the other s///-eval solutions ought to be done with his also, I think.
> These people would be unfairly punished if these solutions are allowed.
> And of course the people who used it would be punished if they were not
> allowed (to my mind not unfairly, but I seem to be in a minority position
> there).
I don't think it would be too unfair to reject the s///-eval solutions, just
that the reasons for doing so are still a little fuzzy to me. I definitely
agree that not having a runtime judge stinks in situations like this. I
probably would have submitted my questionable solutions even if I realized they
were questionable, since it's debatable whether the rules are being violated.
> Also notice that I updated the two memory rules a bit, hopefully making
> them clearer. I would appreciate it if people would review them.
Good job and thank you... I still find rule 12 a little misleading since the
point seems to be about memory addresses and data structure sizes, but it
starts out by talking about total memory. I might write it as something like:
You may assume that a memory address or datastructure size can be represented
in a plain 32-bit integer. This implies that you must not try to generate
arbitrarily large datastructures, and that total memory is less than 2**32
bytes. This does -not- imply that you can actually use that much memory...
your real memory could be a lot less! See the next rule for some guarantees
about minimum amounts of memory you have available.
-- Mike
--
Michael W. Thelen
Just don't create a file called -rf. :-)
--Larry Wall in <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
