Hacker News Reader

Comment by wishfish | Hacker News Reader

I've finished Exapunks. Should go back and finish TIS-100.

One thing I both love & hate about Zachtronics is the Histogram of Doom that appears at the end of each problem. There's no better feeling than ending up in the top ranks for efficiency or speed. And no worse feeling than refactoring everything and still not budging from the middle of the pack.

Considering you're being ranked against other players, in some ways this makes a Zachtronics game one of the more vicious multiplayer games. I mean, you're never playing against another player directly. But you're always being compared to others and it can be humbling at times.

View on HN

One of the other problems is that people can look up and submit worked solutions which skews the results.

(psychological) survival of the fittest (at getting themselves out the social comparison pain box)

I wonder how hard of a problem detecting this would be, with the goal of unskewing the scores?

Could they simply hash your solution and see if you match someone else exactly? What if you give someone credit for exact matches because they don't have exact matches on other problems and sometimes it's just more likely? What are some other ways this could be evaluated?

It wouldn't be too hard, you'd need a model for baseline improvement which should be obtainable by those who do improve slowly and incrementally.

Instead of using a probability density field on the final submissions I would use one based on the likelihood of a person getting to that point within the time they took ~ skill * time.

You could ask on submission if it's a worked solution so then you're only looking for false submissions, but since there is no prize for getting a high score there would be little incentive to lie. Those using worked submissions marked as their own for their own ego would have an unusual submission pattern.

There are many layout options for the same algorithms and it's likely that a rough percentage of worked solutions could be obtained where a specific layout appears much more often than it should.

Worked submissions are also much more likely to be final submissions.

Not sure if I remember correctly, but maybe you need to give a solution before progressing. I would make it possible to progress without giving a solution to take away that incentive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com