What motivates you?

Specifically in a competition context. footpad has mentioned that he would simply complete the competition in order to see what he could learn. A very noble cause, indeed. However, I rather suspect some of the Monks may have a more competitive streak.

So, let me know what you want and I'll see what I can do.

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Brother Marvell

Motivation comes in many forms; here are three threads that reveal various aspects of the values and ideals motivating many of the monks. They cover different topics, but still provide interesting insights:
• Why do monks put up with it?
• Motivations
• How DO those monks do it?

Regardless of the above, remember, we're all here to learn Perl. Do we really need a reason?

--f

My motivation for taking part in this contest (or at least, having written something that vaguely fulfills the requirements although I won't be sending it in due to lack of time) is the plain fun. I know how to use the modules from CPAN (LWP and Date::Manip in my case), and I know how to download something programmatically from the web, so I left these parts out as trivial. This contest gave me a nice challenge to think about a good control flow for such a program, together with a closely defined boundary. Playing with regular expressions and somemwhat striving for elegance, this was more like a scribbling and/or sketching session to me than the attempt to deliver a painting (and I don't think my scribbling is worth finnishing up and sending it in).

As I am too lazy to compete now (or afraid to show my inability), this contest has brought me some time of goal-oriented pondering much like other brain-teasers or searches for algorithms do as well - I find such things relaxing and entertaining.

Another thing contributing to my lazyness was the factor that the contest will be/will have been decided by the ability to time a mail transfer to jcwren such that the mail arrives/is sent at 00:00h EST. On the other side, the obvious problem (as discussed above by AgentM) is the problem of ranking, and time of arrival is one good method to judge.

Would that be local time or standard time? It is often the case that monks are on opposite sides of the globe and there will be a time differential between them.

I too like algorithmic problems, I hope (and probably with Zigster's help) to formulate a challenge where the is a clear metric as to which solution is "best".

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Brother Marvell

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Zigster

Perhaps this could be part of the prize - setting the next challenge - surely no mean feat in itself if it's going to be interesting enough to entice others to have a go.

Pete