[vox] ACM programming contest

[Norm Matloff]

I agree 100% with Bill.  My complaint about the ACM and other similar
contests, especially the international ones, is that they boil down to
math contests in disguise.

Norm

On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 07:49:20PM -0800, Bill Broadley wrote:
> On 11/10/2010 05:51 PM, Brian Lavender wrote:
> > I'll run it. Prizes? Someone else can get those. Who is interested in
> > doing it?
> 
> I'm not a fan of the common contest along the lines of:
>    Given this input <a list of foo>, read them in and sort/pack/search/solve
>    and then output the list.  You have till deadline Z... Go!
> 
> I would however be interested in a collaborative programming on something 
> useful and/or fun.  Something like:
> * A networked game
> * Porting a useful library to a platform in need
> * writing a useful plugin
> * implementing a bot for a networked game
> * Adding a feature to some open source project.
> 
> Then again a cool programming contest would be to write a bot for a game and 
> have the game rules decide the winner.   Hopefully something way simpler than 
> RARS[1].   Maybe something more along the lines of c-robots[2], or xbattle[3], 
> or a simple 2-d tank game.
> 
> [1] http://rars.sourceforge.net/
> [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crobots
> [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbattle
> 
> 
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