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        riddles >> suggestions, help, and FAQ >> voting
        
(Message started by: cnmne on Jul 28^th, 2002, 7:05pm)

Title: voting
Post by cnmne on Jul 28^th, 2002, 7:05pm

it might be nice to have some voting.

vote for your favorite riddle.
vote for how difficult you thought a riddle was - rate it.

Title: Re: voting
Post by Eric Yeh on Aug 2^nd, 2002, 8:38pm

This is an excellent idea. Eventually, it can overtake the role of classifying the riddles. In fact, you won't even necessarily need to categorize them any more, just have them rated on a continuous scale.

On a related note, I also think you should fold the CS and MSFT puzzles back in. I never look at them just because they're outside my usual domain, but I probably should. You can distinguish them with "CS" and "MSFT" the same way you currently set apart the math puzzles with an "M".

Best,
Eric

Title: Re: voting
Post by william wu on Aug 5^th, 2002, 2:00pm

Yea, I like this voting idea a lot too. Don't know when I'll have time to implement all this stuff though. But I am definitely incorporating it into my hypothetical plan for overhauling this site, sometime before the end of the century ;D Sigh. Stupid GREs.

I think I'd prefer to keep the CS problems separate from the other sections. They tend to use terms that no one's ever heard of, except CS people. It's too specialized. Math, however, is a common language spanning across many different fields, so I feel comfortable keeping those problems in the general "easy medium hard" categories.

The Microsoft problems are just really different, because they are so open-ended. Estimate the number of diapers in the United States? Or design Bill Gates' bathroom? I think the distinction is clear. These are problems for which there really is no right answer -- it's more about showing off your creativity and attention to detail.

Conclusively, I think the distinctions are well made. And personally, if I'm scanning these riddles, I would like to stay in the same mindset while doing so ... I wouldn't want to jump to and fro between open-ended creativity problems and analytical algorithm design problems. That might result in cache thrashing :)

Title: Re: voting
Post by Eric Yeh on Aug 7^th, 2002, 3:35pm

But Will, that's what the "M" etc. marks are for! And when you have the DB, you can let people filter by these flags as well.

I could also hypothetically start putting out math problems that would also be like the CS ones in the sense you suggest (wrt terminology), e.g. "Prove that a 1-dimensional Krull ring is a Dedekind domain." "M". See? ;) :)

Best,
Eric