Monthly Competition? Would you participate?

[ModShop]

I'd compete from time to time if the competitions were interesting.

[BHX]

I think we should try to keep the competitions pure C++ related. In other words, no specialized programs (games, music, etc.) as that would make it hard for a few programmers here as I know not all programmers here are game programmers or music/sound programmers, etc. After all there are tons of other sites that do game/music compos and there is even that one site that says "Make a game in a month".

What I was thinking was something like what I was told in an IRC channel. A guy made a program that read a file in then made up sentences by putting random words together. How it worked is it would go through the log file, pick a word at random, then continue to go through the log file to find the first word and would post the next word after that in the sentence. It would go until it hit the end of the file.

So if the first random word it got was The/the, it would read the log until it found another The/the, then take the word after that (let's say 'book'). It would then put book and look for the next occurrence of book, take the next work and put it in the randomly generated sentence, and keep doing that til EOF.

_{END OF LINE}

[S G H]

BHXSpecter wrote:

_{END OF LINE}

Maybe _{END OF STREAM}?
Anyways, it won't be of any fun anymore.
I think we should allow for some competitions to be library-based, like, with SDL, SFML or so, just to be able to bring some fun in.

This may also include generating fractals, which will cause a lot of fun for graphics and (maybe not) audio.

[Peter87]

BHXSpecter wrote:

What I was thinking was something like what I was told in an IRC channel. A guy made a program that read a file in then made up sentences by putting random words together. How it worked is it would go through the log file, pick a word at random, then continue to go through the log file to find the first word and would post the next word after that in the sentence. It would go until it hit the end of the file.

So if the first random word it got was The/the, it would read the log until it found another The/the, then take the word after that (let's say 'book'). It would then put book and look for the next occurrence of book, take the next work and put it in the randomly generated sentence, and keep doing that til EOF.

And based on what should the winner be decided?

EssGeEich wrote:

I think we should allow for some competitions to be library-based, like, with SDL, SFML or so, just to be able to bring some fun in.

Libraries could bring some fun but it would probably limit the number of participants, at least if we pick a library to be used. If we let participants decide what library they use themselves the persons that is going to vote might not have that library installed and might not even try it. That would put participants using exotic libraries or older versions to a disadvantage.

[devonrevenge]

oh yeah knowledge of libraries will limit us, (or in my case knowledge generally), perhaps there could be some agreement on difficulty, ie: project euler has hard maths problems but doesn't ask for too high tech programming knowledge

sfml wont work on my comp for some reason, zereo knows what it was i cant remember

[S G H]

Peter87 wrote:

And based on what should the winner be decided?

Votes.
Everyone submits some code, and some other people will vote those codes.
The code that gets more votes, wins.
It will be based probably on correctness, speed, safety and so on.

[3qX21hU5]

sfml wont work on my comp for some reason, zereo knows what it was i cant remember

I believe you had to redownload your copy of the MingGW compiler. If I remember correctly one of the .dll was corrupted.

I think we should try to keep the competitions pure C++ related. In other words, no specialized programs (games, music, etc.) as that would make it hard for a few programmers here as I know not all programmers here are game programmers or music/sound programmers, etc.

I don't really agree with that. There is two reasons why I don't agree with that.

1) That would take a lot of fun out of some competitions. Just because we have a competition that might say "Create a War Themed Game" or something doesn't mean that beginners can't participate to just because they don't know a graphics library. They could always make a console based game, or they could use the competition to start learning a graphics library.

2) If we don't have more experienced competitions all the more experienced members won't really find them all that fun. A beginner could use the harder competitions to learn something about games or graphics and still have fun with it, but a experienced coder will not have fun and will not learn anything if we have very simple problems that most people already know.

Remember these competitions are meant to be as a fun thing to do every month and as a learning experience at least that was my vision. We don't need everyone to be on a "equal level" because that would be impossible unless you really dumb down the questions.


But anyways it looks as if we have a decent amount of people that might be interested in doing this, so most likely we can give it a test run. Now we just need to figure out the details.

Here are some concerns and things we need to figure out.

1) Should we have Games, Graphics, or generally competitions that allow the use of libraries? In my opinion we should.

2) Does everyone agree on a voting type system (IE Every participant gets 1 vote and can't vote for himself, whoever has the most votes wins)?

3) It seems like most people like the idea of people submitting ideas for a competition and then either voting on the best idea or selecting one at random. Need to figure out which model (Or a different one) we want to use to determine what the competitions will be about.

4) Time and date for the competitions.

5) Any other things we can think of.

[S G H]

Zereo wrote:

2) Does everyone agree on a voting type system (IE Every participant gets 1 vote and can't vote for himself, whoever has the most votes wins)?

3) It seems like most people like the idea of people submitting ideas for a competition and then either voting on the best idea or selecting one at random. Need to figure out which model (Or a different one) we want to use to determine what the competitions will be about.

4) Time and date for the competitions.

I really didn't want to be repetitive, but...
Well, as a test run you can see here, as I'm not sure you've seen it (Didn't see you registered, and received no Feedback :< ) :
http://cppcomp.netne.net/showthread.php?tid=2

Anyways:
1. Yes.
2. Yes (Cannot figure out any other way to do it).
3. Like the idea of choosing a competition each time.
4. Each month, with a vote and ideation period of 1 week and competition period of 2 weeks or 4 weeks (My opinion).

I don't want to force anyone to do anything, anyways.

[3qX21hU5]

Ahh very nice EssGeEich looks like you got everything under control :)

[S G H]

Zereo wrote:

Ahh very nice EssGeEich looks like you got everything under control :)

Well, I just like to be able to contribute to the forum.
Gave you permissions to create official competitions' topics and moderate around, in case I may end up offline (We're changing house)

[BHX]

I already do Ludum Dare, and compos at other sites for game competitions and just started Project Euler and Code Chef so none game related projects are taken care of for that matter too. I will try to take part in the ones here as I said, but can't make any promises.

@EssGeEich You just made me feel old. END OF LINE was a reference to the Master Control Program (MCP) from the first Tron movie.

Zereo wrote:

I don't really agree with that. There is two reasons why I don't agree with that.

1) Competitions usually don't give much time to learn a library to be able to make a game. Same with console games, they would have to still learn a library to make a console game.
2)Advanced programmers probably already partake in competitions to challenge them.

[devonrevenge]

I dont think we should think about libraries etc too much, we vote on what competition to enter anyway, perhaps if people really wanted to have their idea chosen it might be best to make it as cross platform as possible so it gets voted for anyway, this way the most people are going ti be involved.

[htirwin]

I would vote for it being either cross platform code with no external dependencies, or that it be restricted to a set of linux operating systems, in which case we could rely on certain linux utilities or we could write a script, give makefile, or give detailed instruction on how to set up a library that will be easy to follow, use, and should work for everyone.

[3qX21hU5]

EDIT: Also for everyone that is interest in participating. EssGeEich was kind enough to set up a website for us to use. We are starting to accept ideas for competitions so head on over here and submit any ideas you have. Then everyone will be given one vote for what they want the competition to be.

Website is here : http://cppcomp.netne.net/index.php

And the Thread for suggestions is here: http://cppcomp.netne.net/showthread.php?tid=2

BHX wrote:

1) Competitions usually don't give much time to learn a library to be able to make a game. Same with console games, they would have to still learn a library to make a console game.

Obviously if it was going to be a Games Competition or anything involved like that it would be a month long competition if not longer. Which gives the average user more then enough time to experiment and build a simple game to submit. I am not talking about beginners that have just started a week ago because they don't really have much business competing in a competition at that stage really in my opinion so we shouldn't have to cater to them.

It might seem a bit harsh but the fact of the matter is we are trying to make it fun and limiting competition problems to only the most basic and easiest problems just so we can include as much of a user base as possible defeats the whole purpose in my eyes because then all the intermediate and up programmers will have no fun.

And no they wouldn't have to learn a library to make a console game, I have made a tick-tac-toe console game, battleship game, checkers, hangman, text based games and more on the console. They might not have looked the greatest and isn't the greatest of platforms for the IO but it worked.

BHX wrote:

2)Advanced programmers probably already partake in competitions to challenge them.

And why can't this one be one of them?

Anyways I say anything should go and we shouldn't have any restrictions. With the concept of the participants voting on what competition type they want it should turn out that most of the users will be happy and give us more of a idea on what type of competitions everyone is looking for.

Anyways this is just a idea at the moment so we will see how it goes and give it a test run. If it is a hit maybe we can look at fine tuning it more. At least that is my opinion.

Devon wrote:

I guess if people do vote for which challenge they want then they wont be voting for something they don't know anyway so it doesnt matter if its an sfml or berlesque idea anyway

Exactly that is why I liked the idea of voting for the competition idea. That way the userbase will be able to decide what level of difficulty they want and what type of competitions they want. Most of the questions wouldn't limit you to a specific library I wouldn't think either. It would be much more general then that I believe. As in just create this ABC program and use whatever library you want to do it.

[ResidentBiscuit]

We should totes use some IRC channel to talk about this. I'm on IRC all day anyways

[S G H]

But you didn't tell us which server/channel you're on.

[naraku9333]

My opinion is the competition should have a language restriction to C++ only (this is cplusplus.com after all).

I also don't think it should "cater" to beginners, if the problems aren't difficult they wont be interesting. Although maybe having separate tasks for beginner/intermediate/advanced levels could work though would be more work for whoever decides the tasks.

As far as external libs go, I think it should be allowed but binaries should be required so anyone can run the app.

For the actual tasks, maybe a way for users to submit problems and community review of those problems before the enter a queue that competition problems can be drawn from. Another option is to have a broad topic such as "write an application that incorporates AI" this way a wide variety of programs can be written that satisfy the requirement.

[S G H]

naraku9333 wrote:

My opinion is the competition should have a language restriction to C++ only (this is cplusplus.com after all).

I think this was an obvious point.
I'd add, NATIVE c++.
Not those extremely weird C++/CLI things (whose types include also a secret "^" symbol who doesn't work as a xor).

naraku9333 wrote:

Maybe having separate tasks for beginner/intermediate/advanced levels could work though would be more work for whoever decides the tasks.

That sounds good, but I'm not sure this could be easy to do...

naraku9333 wrote:

For the actual tasks, maybe a way for users to submit problems and community review of those problems before the enter a queue that competition problems can be drawn from. Another option is to have a broad topic such as "write an application that incorporates AI" this way a wide variety of programs can be written that satisfy the requirement.

Now, I didn't understand this.

[devonrevenge]

I think he means we can discuss our ideas for a challenge before submitting them to be voted on, because their may be issues yet to be pointed out, so maybe a broad challenge like "do a clever thing with computers" so we could all just do the challenge with our favorite libraries.

the problem with a too broad an idea is that it would be hard to pick a winner what with the huge variation in things to define them from each other, its possible though that too simple and we all solve it the same, like project euler

[3qX21hU5]

We can jump onto the ChessPlusPlus projects IRC channel I am sure they wouldn't mind until we can get one for ourselves if we need one.

On irc.freenode.net at #ChessPlusPlus

If you don't have a client you can go here http://webchat.freenode.net/