Challenge motivation.

OK, I take you point. I'd be happy to submit a challenge and take the time to judge others, if required. However, being so new the the Monks, I needs to ask one question:

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.

Brother Marvell

Comment on Challenge motivation.

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Re: Challenge motivation. by footpad (Abbot) on Dec 01, 2000 at 21:19 UTC
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	[reply]
Re: Challenge motivation. by Corion (Patriarch) on Dec 01, 2000 at 19:04 UTC
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.	[reply]
Re: Re: Challenge motivation. by marvell (Pilgrim) on Dec 01, 2000 at 19:37 UTC
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". -- Brother Marvell	[reply]