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Eric Grange
Delphi Developer |
Further "Blind" challenges?2005-06-03 03:41:18 PM delphi176 As a solution to complaints about who used, found or invented ideas first, and to avoid the (IMO bad) solution of having only DCUs published for months, maybe we could reinstate more regular, short, "blind" challenges? I think the previous ones where kinda fun, not knowing exactly where or what the competition is doing, nor exactly in which situation your code would be used/benchmarked emphasized the competitive side quite a bit. The principle would be that for 2-4 weeks, no one publishes anything, neither DCU nor source nor even benchmark figures, and then, at the end of the period, everything is revealed and winners designated. Maybe we could have something regular, like a blind challenge a month? To spice things up, and to not just optimize against known benchmarks, we could have "unknown" benchmarks used, on which the final scoring would be made (would help eliminate bias, if you don't know exactly in which case you will be benched, you can not take too much risks on case-specific optimizations... and it is a little like real-world usage: you don't know how your functions will be used/abused). As for creating the "unknown" benchmarks, a simple solution would be that all participants wouldn't just enter a routine, but also a benchmark of their creation they would keep secret too, and which they are free to "skew" as much as they like to favour their own particular real-world usage scenarii, only requirements being that they use the routine (!), use no more than XXX megabytes of RAM and last approx. YYY seconds on the RTL or a "reference" version of the routine f.i. Eric |