A couple of the Slack/Discord groups I’m in do a local leaderboard with friends. It’s fun to do with a trusted group of people who are all in it for fun.
Premises:
(i) I love Advent of Code and I'm grateful for its continuing existence in whatever form its creators feel like it's best for themselves and the community;
(ii) none of what follows is a request, let alone a demand, for anything to change;
(iii) what follows is just the opinion of some random guy on the Internet.
I have a lot of experience with competitions (although more on the math side than on the programming side), and I've been involved essentially since I was in high school, as a contestant, coach, problem writer, organizer, moving tables, etc. In my opinion Advent of Code simply isn't a good competition:
- You need to be available for many days in a row for 15 minutes at a very specific time.
- The problems are too easy.
- There is no time/memory check: you can write ooga-booga code and still pass.
- Some problems require weird parsing.
- Some problems are pure implementation challenges.
- The AoC guy loves recursive descent parsers way too much.
- A lot of problems are underspecified (you can make assumptions not in the problem statement).
- Some problems require manual input inspection.
To reiterate once again: I am not saying that any of this needs to change. Many of the things that make Advent of Code a bad competition are what make it an excellent, fun, memorable "Christmas group thing". Coming back every day creates community and gives people time to discuss the problems. Problems being easy and not requiring specific time complexities to be accepted make the event accessible. Problems not being straight algorithmic challenges add welcome variety.
I like doing competitions but Advent of Code has always felt more like a cozy problem solving festival, I never cared too much for the competitive aspect, local or global.
One could probably build a separate service that provides a leaderboard for solution runtimes.
I agree that it’s more of a cozy activity than a hardcore competition, that’s what I appreciate about it most.
Just a random example: https://open.kattis.com/problems/magicallights
But the Kattis website is great. The program runs on their server without you getting to know the input (you just get right/wrong back), so a bit different. But also then gives you memory and time constraints which you for the more difficult problems must find your way out of.
The problems are pretty difficult in my book (I never make it past day 3 or so). So I definitely would hope they never increase the difficulty.
LOL!!
I agreed with a lot of what you wrote, but also a lot of us strive for beautiful solutions regardless of time/memory bounds.
In fact, I’m (kind of) tired of leetcode flagging me for one ultra special worst-case scenario. I enjoy writing something that looks good and enjoying the success.
(Not that it’s bad to find out I missed an optimization in the implementation, but… it feels like a lot of details sometimes.)
The vast majority (though not all) of the inputs can be parsed with regex or no real parsing at all. I actually can't think of a day that needed anything like recursive descent parsing.