Distressed, my big game hunter award taken away

[albert]

I have put in much effort over weeks to finally get the big hunter award, solving a last hard problem. Now it is gone again. Can some one look into this ?

Groetjes Albert


p. s. the award I'm most proud off,ever!

[euler]

I feel your pain, but the problem is that it is not a permanent award. If you hover over the award on your Progress page you will see it says, "Progress 24/25". What happened is that yesterday, when that new problem came out the last problem on the Recent page, #541, went into the archives and it is now ranked in the top 50 of the hardest problems. Recent problems are not included in the top 50 hardest/easiest because their difficulty does not get finalised until they enter the archives AND at least 100 people have solved it. The easiest of the top 50 hardest problems yesterday was #245, which you had solved, but when 541 went into the top 50 it knocked #245 out of the top 50 which means you have now solved 24 out of the top 50 hardest problems. To get the award back you're going to have to sort the problem pages on difficulty and solve at least one more problem on the first two pages.

[jaap]

To get the award back you're going to have to sort the problem pages on difficulty and solve at least one more problem on the first two pages.

Shouldn't that be "on the first page"? There are 50 problems per page when I look at the archives.

A lot of problems have the same difficulty. It seems that when sorting by difficulty, the problem number is used as the secondary sorting criterion, with higher-numbered problems rated harder. This makes this award more of a moving target than if that secondary sort were in reverse order. In my opinion it is fun for it to be the way it is, though I am quite far from reaching it.

Still, shouldn't the secondary criterion be the number of people who have solved it (the fewer the harder)? This would keep it skewed towards more recent problems (which have fewer solvers), but seems to me to be a little less arbitrary. It's not important really, I'm just musing.

[hk]

Jaap, the difficulty feature has been designed as suggestion for a solving order.
For obvious reasons it seems wiser to solve problems with a comparable difficulty (being in the same 5% difficulty scale) in publication order rather than in a rather arbitrary solving count order.
Think e.g. about concepts introduced earlier problems and used several times after that.

We settled for about 20 difficulty measures because of the accuracy level of our difficulty assessment algoritm.

We shouldn't an arbitrary border of 50 hard problems for some award let have any influence on a solving order suggestion .

And by the way: solve count as sorting criterion is manipulatable: just make a number of accounts and enter the solution for a a certain problem and you might be able to force it down in the list. Do we want an order that is manipulatable from the outside?
I'd rather not.

[jaap]

Good points, hk. Thanks.

[albert]

I feel your pain, but the problem is that it is not a permanent award. If you hover over the award on your Progress page you will see it says, "Progress 24/25". What happened is that yesterday, when that new problem came out the last problem on the Recent page, #541, went into the archives and it is now ranked in the top 50 of the hardest problems. Recent problems are not included in the top 50 hardest/easiest because their difficulty does not get finalised until they enter the archives AND at least 100 people have solved it. The easiest of the top 50 hardest problems yesterday was #245, which you had solved, but when 541 went into the top 50 it knocked #245 out of the top 50 which means you have now solved 24 out of the top 50 hardest problems. To get the award back you're going to have to sort the problem pages on difficulty and solve at least one more problem on the first two pages.

This is ridiculous. Do you take away the gold medal away, if someone cannot manage to be the first one on the next problem? Trophies should be permanent. I'm proud of the solution of one of my problems I've done from scratch. It gets 10 kudo's. If someone deletes his account, would my kudoes disappear? And with them my award?
Groetjes Albert

[pri_gua]

Please calm down, this is just Project Euler where the primary reason for being here is fun and learning ... let us not let the awards etc. take the focus away from what is more important.

I am taking an open-book approach to problem-solving on PE, i.e. if I can't solve a problem with some effort, I put the answer in (from the internet), then, if the thread has good posts explaining the solution, I then try to understand the solution and finally write the code ... I did this recently for problem 788 and Reiner Martin's post was very understandable, so I was able to replicate the logic/code ...

Again, how about a flag, so that when I enter an answer to the PE problem, I get access to the thread, but does not count towards the number of solvers, so that the statistics are less manipulate-able from the outside ...

[SethTroisi]

I'm also having a bit of mixed emotions. I solved my 700th problem last night! . I've loved solving almost all of those problem and I thoroughly enjoy the clean design of the problems and website.

I took a screenshot and spent a moment looking over some of previous Project Euler screenshots. Looking over some of my previous screenshots I found that back in 2011 I had solved 305 of 320 (qualifying me at the time for max level) then again in 2012 I achieved the max level but sadly I have less time now and that achievement will probably forever have slipped away from me.

[euler]

Whereas there is a reasonable argument that some of the awards should be made permanent - and this is something the admin team have been discussing recently - there are others that might make it unfair for newer members.

For example, person A is a new member and they might complain that back in 20XX when there were 310 problems, person B had solved 150 problems to earn "The Archivist" for having solved half of the problems in the archives. Now person A has solved over 300 problems and not only would that have been enough to have earned "Master of the Archives" (for solving every problem in the archives) back in 20XX, but they wouldn't even qualify for "The Archivist" today.

The idea of those types of awards is to give members an incentive to keep actively solving problems, but I do understand the frustration. Obviously I am not saying we will definitely be making changes, but be assured that we do not ignore reasonable suggestions and we will consider to discuss the matter.