OK, this idea came to me as I was going to sleep at the end of a week containing a golf contest, so it might be horrible, but it's at least interesting.
If people still want to do monthly contests, this could be an a way of passing the time during the other three weeks (um, once you're out of physical therapy). Basically, it would be like the usual on-list golfing people do, but it would be modified to allow additional newbie participation, and veteran fun. Someone proposes a hole, along with a test program on, say, Sunday. Sunday and Monday, people think about it. Tuesday, you're allowed to start submitting solutions. However, only solutions above 150 characters are allowed. On Wednesday, the max is reduced to 120, Thursday it's 100, Friday it's 80, and after that, anything is allowed. (The derivative of the max score could be modified if this doesn't work right.) The idea here is that newbies get a couple days to work on solutions, and then can submit them, knowing that they've got a chance to do a "first post" that wins, at least for that day. In the following hours, people could work together to shorten their solutions, as long as they don't go below 150. The following days would be a nice public demonstration of golfing techniques. Veterans, meanwhile, would surely be embarrassed to post something that long, so they won't just take their 43 character solution and put in lots of whitespace. On the other hand, they'll be invited to submit solutions that take lots of characters but do it in very interesting ways -- also known as artistic/unorthodox solutions. Yet another interesting aspect of this is that it would foster the maximum number of algorithms without regard for length -- gradually evolution would allow the most shortenable solutions to survive. (For the physicists and computational chemists and biologists in the crowd, we're thermostatting the system at a high temperature first to allow for good equilibration, then gradually quenching it and throwing out local minima, until we hopefully find the "true" minimum. Call it the "protein golfing" problem!) I'm imagining that this "contest" would be a sort of combination between the current golf contests and the more friendly collaborative golfing that goes on on the mailing list. (Admittedly, it's possible such a hybrid wouldn't work at all.) ^m|r (@m:r?)
