Suggestion: tell the delay time to player

[dyunov]

Hello, everyone! I would like to thank the team behind Project Euler for providing such an entertaining resource. The 'pure mathematics' style of most problems is what makes Project Euler stand out among online programming contest systems (this was the main reason for me to join).

I have a question/suggestion regarding the delay between sending answers into the system to validate them. I'm a new player, and in the course of a few days I have solved around 50 problems, so the waiting interval has increased for me to around forty minutes. Since I generally solve the problems sequentially, near this part of the archive I do it faster than I am able to send answers. The latter takes quite a lot of time and patience. I found a message on the forum that says that the delay will decrease after 24 hours of inactivity, and decided to stop sending the answers for now.

My question: is there a way for a regular user such as myself to find out the current delay without resetting it? Maybe there is some technical page with this information, and I just did not manage to find it. If this feature does not exist yet, I would like to ask the administration to introduce it, if possible. I think many users want to know clearly when they are allowed to send the answer, and when they are not. It is very inconvenient for an eager solver like me to send one solution, then wait e. g. 30 minutes (or even a few hours!) and retry only to find out that the delay just reset, since it had actually already raised to 32.

As for the reason the delay system was added: showing the delay on the page explicitly would also provide this information to a potential cheater's automated scripts, but currently a script can also obtain the delay time after the first unsuccessful attempt and adjust it later, so this feature won't make the cheaters' life any easier.

The information I would like to be shown is 1) the current maximum delay and 2) the current remaining delay (or its 'complement', the time that has already passed). Maybe there should also be 3) remaining time before the next maximum delay shortening. Example: "You can send your answer 22 min later. Total sending delay 37 min (next shortening in 23 h 45 min)." This could either be shown on every problem page, or maybe on the Account or Progress pages.

I think the suggested change would make sending the answer more convenient for many players, not only novices like me, but also more experienced ones who solve the problems often and in bulk. Please provide your thoughts on my suggestion.

[euler]

Hi, dyunov. Sorry for taking so long to reply, but life gets so busy! I did see your original post and the team have been considering ways of addressing this issue. So there are a couple of changes that we plan to implement. Solving problems 1-100 will no longer add any additional wait time. Additionally, if a wait time is incurred for submitting answers to problems 101+, then instead of having to submit an answer, only to be told "You are not permitted to submit another guess within X of your previous submission", the submission box will simply be removed with a message that says, "You must wait X before submitting any more answers".

[dyunov]

Thank you very much for implementing my suggestion, euler and team! The interface is much more convenient now. The delay lift on the first 100 problems is going to be very helpful, too. The difficulty seems to start increasing rapidly in the latter part of the archives' second page, and it becomes next to impossible (for a rookie who does not cheat) to solve these in the course of a few minutes, contrarily to the first few dozen ones.

I'm just going to say again that I really enjoy the problems, I have just entered the range where they start to make heavier use of combinatorics and results in number theory. Programming contests tend to suffer from the issue of being solvable by (however cleverly) applying a combination of standard fast algorithms, but this is not at all the case with Project Euler; you need to gain insight into the mathematical formulation of the problem to solve it, thinking is way more important than implementing. Thank you once again!