On Tue, 25 Nov 2008, Charles Reiss wrote: > On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 22:44, Roger Hicks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 23:32, Charles Reiss <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> That's what I'd expect in this form given that expecting people to >>> know how to program usually isn't considered unreasonable. But, of >>> course, there are practical problems with doing any-language-you-want >>> (do you have a Hypertalk interpreter? Z80 assembly? VisualWorks?), so >>> things probably need to be more restricted in practice. Probably the >>> closest canonical example of a contest is the (much less theoretically >>> interesting) http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~darse/rsbpc.html . >>> >> Why not have the competing programs communicate via an HTTP post? > > Cons: Making sure all programs are available at the same time. People > going against the spirit of the game could use manual intervention to > change strategy (timeouts can disincentivize this). Harder to run a > whole lot of rounds (which would give a clearer idea of winner).
I think these are big enough cons, you really want round-robin multiple rounds. I don't think you have to worry too much about assembly, etc., you're probably offering enough diversity if you offer a small range of standard programming languages. It might be better to just get this off the ground by "adding languages by request where possible", you shouldn't end up with too many? -Goethe
