Ask HN: Replace submission voting in HN by Google-style AI Challenges?

[amichail]

Instead of voting on submissions, why not have a weekly AI challenge whereby people making submissions would also submit code for the challenge? As the week progresses, you can improve your code, even for submissions already made.

The ranking of the front page of submissions would be based on the ranking of the associated programs for the AI challenge. Points gained by your AI program would be divided by the number of submissions associated with that program.

The AI challenge setup would be similar to the Google one: http://ai-contest.com/

What do you think?

[anigbrowl]

I think it's too much work for a news site, but the idea of continuous/rolling mini-challenges has merit, both as a demonstration and education tool. This warrants further exploration.

[rouli]

maybe instead of a captcha (not that hacker news has a captcha, but bare with me), submitters would be required to answer a Project Euler like problem. Obviously I'm not serious, but it can be an interesting way to moderate the submissions.

[wwortiz]

I don't really understand what you want.

[amichail → wwortiz]

It means that the submissions that rank highly would be ones submitted by people who are really good at the AI challenge -- real hackers!

[wwortiz → amichail]

So hackers is now limited to AI programmers? I suspect a highly biased front page would then be an effect.

[amichail → wwortiz]

I think it would be fun and would attract a huge number of top hackers to the site.