I have noticed the last 75 or so community puzzles have been very low quality. I might make some more top tier ones as per usual, so sharpen your pencils.
2 Likes
A bit harsh towards the authors of the last 75 puzzles (there were also some good ones among them), but we will not oppose to new quality content! What about some new BFS pathfindings in a maze? 
4 Likes
Westicles — Much respect to you for all your accomplishments in codingame and for your excellent puzzles. More puzzles from you would certainly be very welcomed by all.
But really !!??!!. That’s a pretty broad claim/insult!!
I will brag for a moment here, and point out that 5 of mine are in the top 20 most highly-rated (easy) puzzles, even though they likely fall in your “last 75”/“very low quality” category.
4 Likes
Westicles is our troll here at CG. Every place has one, it seems. Don’t pay too much attention to what he says, don’t feed the troll, keep coding …
1 Like
Westicle’s puzzles are the best ones… (or not)
Hi Lisa, yes of course I didn’t mean to include yours, they are some of the best!
1 Like
I think that is probably a joke since there are literally 200 BFS puzzles here, but that does bring up the subject… what kind of puzzles are missing? I love probability puzzles since so many people seem to not understand how that works. What do you think?
A year ago, I was struggling to participate in Cultist Wars. @jacek made a comment on Discord about needing an algorithm like Minimax. I found a video on Youtube that I had to watch several times to begin to understand, but what really got me over the hump was this puzzle by @aCat:
I’d like to see more puzzles that teach me things that will help me do better in bot programming.
As for this:
I look forward to seeing you making more comments as a reviewer on new submissions! I haven’t been on CG all that long, but I’ve been reviewing puzzle contributions for at least 6 months and I don’t remember seeing your comments on any of those contributions.
And this:
I will admit, you do create nice puzzles, so whatever motivates you to get back in creation mode works for me!
2 Likes
Thanks for the kind words! I really only agreed to do this because my good friends on https://www.cheloniangall.com/ keep saying how much they like my puzzles
Suggestion:
Can you figure out a way to make a puzzle, so that creating the random part of it is not a big part of the task??
Like…
In C#, you use…
public static Random random = new Random() ~and~ random.Next()
And if you hard code in a number like
new Random(1234)
…. the randoms are the same each time.
At one point, I attempted to do a puzzle that compared two lists of US states: one ordered by average education of citizen, and one ordered by average income of citizens.
In the real lists of that, six that are in the top 10 of list1 are also in the top 10 of list2, and I wanted to see what the odds of that randomly happening were if those two things were unrelated.
Ahhh the times before CG allowed graphical puzzles and I had to do weird text-based ones :P.
But glad it was a help to someone :-).
In next years I will probably encode more of the exercises we are using on our university AI course, but I’m lazy on that ;p - so far I did only bfs/minmax ones for rook-mates.
1 Like
I’m not sure about making new puzzles. I mean, basically we are creating free new IP for some company and getting no praise or credit for it? I would like to see some systematic framework for thanking us for contributing valuable free IP before going forward with more genius puzzles.
1 Like
I understand where you’re coming from, but the problem I see you running into is guys like me. I’ll participate all day long with no expectations of praise, credit, gratitude, etc. just because it’s fun.
2 Likes
Yeah I’m weird like that too, Tim.
I get what Westicles means, but I learn a ton while making my puzzles, so that benefits me.
Also…
On my worst days (when the disrespect and isolation I get at work makes me so depressed), I can close my eyes and imagine that dozens of people all over the world interacted with something I made, and had a positive (educational) experience from it (and the occasional nice written feedback from players) is the thrill I NEED.
3 Likes