How would the difficulty of Clash of Code puzzles compare to Easy puzzles?
Usually the spirit when creating a puzzle is, if it’s a bit too short/easy/straightforward to make it a puzzle, propose it as a CoC.
But the difficulty cursor is not the same for every creator so you can be surprised sometimes.
Some CoC are not that short and easy, and some easy puzzles should definitively have been a CoC instead.
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I think that spirit of classifying the both on difficulty alone is completely misguided and ought to stop. It being repeatedly chanted on the puzzle contributions doesn’t make it any more Right, and reminds me of the five monkeys experiment more and more as it repeats. It’s one of those things on my future write-ups list I still haven’t gotten around to.
And that experiment appears to have been grossly misreported, too. TIL. Now you too can contribute to stop spreading it as gospel truth.
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It’s true that ultimately the only requirement for CoC is to be doable in 5 min, regarless the difficulty.
There’s room for hard problems with short solutions, but you don’t see them much.
From the 500+ CoC I did, I don’t remember finding a problem ‘hard’, most of the time what would make a CoC hard to solve in 5min would be complicated parsing, or handling of many technical edge cases.
And the few CoCs that were a bit harder than usual were often downvoted.
So I’m not saying that CoC should be easy (I also wish there would be more challenging problems), I was more answering to the question “what kind of difficulty can you usually expect in a CoC ?”
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