I suggest a contest that has the following objectives:
Create a program that detects graphic collisions. Stated another way, create a program that includes animation or movement of an object. When that object runs into another object, cause something to happen.
For example, a pong game. A dot in the pong game moves around. When it hits a line or edge, it deflects away.
Second example, Light bikes a dot moves on the screen leaving
a line behind it. the longer the program goes, the faster the dot moves. If the dot hits the edge of the screen the program stops. If the line hits itself, the program stops. Use the keyboard keys to let the user turn the line.
These are two very, very simple suggestions for the objective. Winner could be based on cleanliness of code and 'sexiness' of submission. Code must be orginal. Submitted code will be made public to anyone that wants to use it.
The fun of this suggestion is in the fact that people can take it as far as they want -- they can do some very creative things.
Just a thought.
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I copied/moved my post since we now have this one.
I got a good suggestion for another contest - GUI Design.
Give a list of required controls and basic functions for a form and
have the contestants come up with the control layout and
program the functionality? Totally creative, now one can copy,
winner can be judged on functionality and design. How about
that?
VB/Office Guru™ (AKA: Gangsta Yoda™ ®)
I dont answer coding questions via PM. Please post a thread in the appropriate forum.
Voxel = 3D pixel. Basically a pixel that has a x, y and z -coordinates. How to come up with voxels is up to the creator of the program Voxels are rather heavy to process, so they'd be of a challenge.
Personally, I'd prefer to see contests of what I'd call "semi-production" stuff, by that I mean projects that may turn out to be useful in the real world and be fun to code at the same time.
General ideas:
* Winform-related controls. Why winform ? Because the whole issue about ASP.NET although revolutionary is a bit overrated IMHO - plus everyone is putting out ASP controls but I feel that there is a shortage of simple and useful Winform controls.
* Web services, but not of the boring "A web service that returns the time" type. Something challenging and interesting would be nice here.
* VS Add-ins.
* .Net framework low-level stuff.
* DNN modules.
I won't go into specifics because everyone has a different perception about "neat" and "boring", I'm sure the ppl coming up with new contests will think of something.
Come to think of it, every single one of my general ideas is, more or less, related to .Net. OK, you can make a web service using the SOAP toolkit but there's no fun doing it. So I guess I'm a bit biased towards VB.Net...but then again, that's the future of VB whether we like it or not.
Sorry to keep too similar to the current contest already running but how about a cops & robber kinda thing. Using maps liek we've seen in the pathfinding we could have a load of "Cops" on a map and one "Robber", the score could be based on how long it takes the cops to catch the robber.
So each person would submit a Cop Code & a Robber Code. Then we would play people code against others. (This way the Cop code would manage all the cops so they could work as a team)
Or
We could do like i just said but each cop on the map is a different persons code and we see who catches the Robber first. This would have to be split into different matches because we couldn't put a cop in for every entry cos that could be too many depending on the amount of entries .
P.S. The view wouldn't be as restricted as it has been in the Pathfinder one though .
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If we did some kind of GUI design contest, could we have part of
the points come from Poll results? This would allow members to
be a part of the judging and it wouldn't be subjective to just a
few opinions?
VB/Office Guru™ (AKA: Gangsta Yoda™ ®)
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True, thats why it would only count for part of the overall points.
I thought it would eliminate some of the reactions like we had
from the Prime Number contest.
VB/Office Guru™ (AKA: Gangsta Yoda™ ®)
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A dance screen that dances to the music. There is some code in the API that allows you to get the sound buffer so you can read it in. I had problems early on because it didnt work with all soundcards. I wonder if its fixed now?
I propose Challanges to be part of this forum.
And to kick it off, the first challange would be to create the next Largest Magical Hexagon than what was last achieved.
By Largest, there would be 2 considerations:
1) If the Last Largest Magical Hexagon had n rings, the next greatest would be one that has n+1 rings.
or
2) If the Last Largest Magical Hexagon had a magic number of k, whose ringcount was n, if someone submitted one with an identical ringcount, but whose mNum was Larger, then That would then be known as the Most Current Largest Magical Hexagon.
All Successful Achievements would remain posted.
Now, to get everybody's head warmed up, a contest could be a speed test, whereby entrents must return all 3 ring magical hexagons in the shortest amount of time.
Only 1 representative of each magical hexagon must be returned, ie... For each valid magical hexagon, there are 6 equivalent rotations, and for each rotation, there is a reflection. So, only 1 of those 12 variations must be returned.
Also, in the case of "Adds to 0", there exists several Magical Hexagons that aren't rotations or reflections, but are multiplicatively identical, *-1.
These, too, must be filtered out.
So, For the challange, I submit My 6 Ring as the initial "World's Largest Magical Hexagon".
And, for all who want, I've attached some reading material, 3 attachments, starting from this post:
But anyway the point of my reply and my suggestion that relates to what NotLKH just posted. I think we should try to stay away from contests where people already have something for it and dont even have to do anything. One thing that makes it a contest is the time limit. Although so far its been more than enough it could proove to be a factor some time another. I dont think we should say well I have this project that does that so lets have a contest on it.
The Prime Numbers sort of showed this, it was already well known to some people and they had already nearly perfected methods of doing it. But that was just a trial contest so all was well . The PathFinder was great because people actually had to work with something given so it was impossible for them to already have a working solution that just had to be trimmed and prepped.
I got this weird idea: how about having some contest so that you must pair up with someone, code together? Personally, I've never been good in teamwork, but a contest might be something that could make me considering teamworking. It would also cause some more competivity between the team members, because for sure the other one doesn't want to win because of the other's skills: it wouldn't feel like a victory if your team wins and you didn't do all that much for it.
Though, I have no idea whom I would pair with in such a contest. Probably the contest thing should be slightly too big for one person to handle in the given time.
How the teaming would work depends on how the team wants: like, other one could code a lot, but leave the bug testing for the other member. Or both could do their part on coding and bugtest the code. There are many ways to go.
Write an Addin that does something useful that MZTools doesn't already do. Some things might be the ability to examine all your variables and make sure that their names conform to a set of rules that you can define, or a "lines of code" counter (what a "line" is would need to be defined), or a dead Sub/Function finder, or all of the above.
Something like what Electroman posted sounds like fun, where all the contestants programs compete with each other.
Like we all program a robot. Then all robots fight each other. Last one standing is the winner.
We should be given functions to work with, like in the Maze-AI contest.
Never argue with fools, they will only drag you down to their level, and beat you with experience.
Q: How do you tell an experienced hacker from a novice?
A: The latter thinks there's 1000 bytes in a kilobyte, while the former is sure there's 1024 meters in a kilometer
Originally posted by McCain Something like what Electroman posted sounds like fun, where all the contestants programs compete with each other.
Like we all program a robot. Then all robots fight each other. Last one standing is the winner.
We should be given functions to work with, like in the Maze-AI contest.
We should be given a pre-defined Interface to implement, that way everyone's robot would be standardised. Then it would be down to pure code quality as to who wins.
What do you mean with "Interface"?
What I ment was that we were given functions, like walk(), run(), look(), aim(), shoot(), listen() etc. Those functions should be the ONLY functions we were allowed to use to interact with the robot.
The functins could take some specified time to run, so that one would have to decide if it's worth the extra time to aim or if the robot should just shoot at once.
If we got a say() function we could code a whole team of robots that interacted with each other and worked as a team against the other robots.
Man I would enjoy taking part in a contest like that!!!
Never argue with fools, they will only drag you down to their level, and beat you with experience.
Q: How do you tell an experienced hacker from a novice?
A: The latter thinks there's 1000 bytes in a kilobyte, while the former is sure there's 1024 meters in a kilometer
I kind of guessed that, but wasen't 100% sure. Sometimes my English skills are lacking a bit...
BTW, what is the date for the next competition?
Never argue with fools, they will only drag you down to their level, and beat you with experience.
Q: How do you tell an experienced hacker from a novice?
A: The latter thinks there's 1000 bytes in a kilobyte, while the former is sure there's 1024 meters in a kilometer
Originally posted by wossname We should be given a pre-defined Interface to implement, that way everyone's robot would be standardised. Then it would be down to pure code quality as to who wins.
This sounds really interesting. This is a good idea.
I like the GUI suggestion. Just a way to see how many different ways we can come up with a form design that fufills a specific function in the most elegant way.
It'd let those without a lot of VB experience compete with the experts, and the most creative entry might just win!
I'm starting not to care what it is. As long as it's something I'm happy. I really would enjoy a contest right now.
Never argue with fools, they will only drag you down to their level, and beat you with experience.
Q: How do you tell an experienced hacker from a novice?
A: The latter thinks there's 1000 bytes in a kilobyte, while the former is sure there's 1024 meters in a kilometer
Anything besides another game contest. The contest topics should
change from contest to contest. This would allow those who dont
like games that much to participate once in a while too.
VB/Office Guru™ (AKA: Gangsta Yoda™ ®)
I dont answer coding questions via PM. Please post a thread in the appropriate forum.
Ok, then I have another competition suggestion:
Make a program that can decrypt messages with a very basic encryption. Examples of the kind of encryptions I'm talking about would be where you substitute the letter 'a' with 1, 'b' with 2 and so on, or when you "move" the alphabeth (i.e. 'a' becomes 'c', 'b' becomes 'd' and 'm' becomes 'o').
Given a pice of text the program should be able to understand what kind of encryption it is and to decrypt the text.
Never argue with fools, they will only drag you down to their level, and beat you with experience.
Q: How do you tell an experienced hacker from a novice?
A: The latter thinks there's 1000 bytes in a kilobyte, while the former is sure there's 1024 meters in a kilometer
Originally posted by McCain Ok, then I have another competition suggestion:
Make a program that can decrypt messages with a very basic encryption. Examples of the kind of encryptions I'm talking about would be where you substitute the letter 'a' with 1, 'b' with 2 and so on, or when you "move" the alphabeth (i.e. 'a' becomes 'c', 'b' becomes 'd' and 'm' becomes 'o').
Given a pice of text the program should be able to understand what kind of encryption it is and to decrypt the text.
That is unbelievably hard. The program would literally need a dictionary and the ability to recognize basic grammar!
Don't pay attention to this signature, it's contradictory.
Yeah, I know. But the idea is that it should be hard, right?
I think it could be fun as long as you keep to realy simple encodings.
Never argue with fools, they will only drag you down to their level, and beat you with experience.
Q: How do you tell an experienced hacker from a novice?
A: The latter thinks there's 1000 bytes in a kilobyte, while the former is sure there's 1024 meters in a kilometer
Originally posted by alkatran That is unbelievably hard. The program would literally need a dictionary and the ability to recognize basic grammar!
No it wouldn't. It is actualy very easy to do this and you don't need a dictionary (which are freely available anyway).
This would be an interesting contest I think, and that's why I'm not going to tell you how to do it in case it comes up in the future. There are plenty of websites devoted to simple code breaking. Interesting subject.
Another thought springs to mind: Dictionary attack coupled to a Genetic Algorithm, would provide almost perfect accuracy as long as the cypher uses not too many jargon words (no more than 20% of total words) i reckon.
Last edited by wossname; Nov 9th, 2004 at 10:43 AM.
An Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) generation algorithm would be a great challenge and its easily defined too...
Given N number of dots (randomly distributed on a 2d plane) work out an algorithm to draw lines to connect the dots together (see picture). The total length of all the lines must be as short as possible. N can vary from 3 to 500.
That's it. There are several methods and speed of the code is an issue when N --> 500.
easily achieveable in VB6 or .Net
A simple solution would look a bit like:
***EDIT***
Last edited by wossname; Nov 10th, 2004 at 08:35 AM.
Voxels are rather heavy to process, so they'd be of a challenge.
)
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