Feedback on "Code Challenge" Four

The subject is too broad

I know you are trying to make these challenges as open-ended as possible. However, this is too open-ended. Actually, after reading the challenge instructions multiple times, I'm still not sure I completely understand what you expect.

In this challenge, we want to see if you can bring the future into the present. Can you create a futuristic technology? Or even a portion of it?

For example, you could focus on smart home technology. In the future, perhaps your home would automatically make food for you. In this challenge, you could create a food prediction software that would know what kind of food you’d like to eat.

As another example, creating an immersive 3D room experience (inspired by something like the Holodeck from Star Trek) might require a user interface to allow participants to choose an experience. How might that interaction work? What options would it provide, and how would their choices be reflected in a scenario’s creation?

So you expect us to program some kind of thing that could simulate a futuristic technology? Without providing us with any information about what form should it take? On something as broad as a "futuristic technology"?

Say I programmed a something that would, by your standards, be considered a futuristic technology. Then, it wouldn't be futuristic, since I, at the present day, would have been able to program it.

Details like this also don't help:

Note: this should specifically be something that does not exist yet in the real world.

Wait, you just gave "you could create a food prediction software that would know what kind of food you’d like to eat." as an example, pretty sure it's something that exist. This confuses me even more as to what does "futuristic technology" mean.

While I love creativity, this is waaay too broad, there's no way having four staff-chosen winners and one upvote-chosen winner can be fair with such an abstract topic. I can hardly imagine how would you even decide what qualifies as a proper entry for your challenge and what doesn't.

Non-coding skills risk being put too much forward

This challenge puts at an advantage all skills other than coding. Say someone programs that 3D room example of yours, it means this person has:

• 3D modelling skills
• 2D graphics designing skills
• UI/UX skills
• Game design skills
• Potentially music composing skills?

With the way you've worded the challenge, it feels like instead of wanting the smartest code to solve a problem, you want the most cool looking program to show off, meaning those above aspects are going to be heavily prioritized, leaving programming skills behind.

In short, even though this is a coding challenge, someone making a CLI program stands no chance in front of someone making a full-on game, even if that CLI program's code is actually much smarter, more optimized and closer to the idea of being a futuristic technology.

Please don't encourage AI usage

Consider what role Artificial Intelligence might play in your tech. Perhaps it can help you with the challenge.

I was already heartbroken when I saw that the usage of AI was allowed on the previous challenges, but now you're even encouraging it.

I'll reformulate my currently most upvoted comment to fit this situation:

A huge portion of SE mods once went on strike over AI. Yet, SE Inc. shows again that it still hasn't understood to what extent AI is disliked by the community. You keep trying to force us to jump on the AI hype train that all the big companies have created even though it's been said countless times that the whole point of SO is that its content has actual standards that AI doesn't (and can't) meet.

Look, I don't want AI in my life, especially for challenges that are meant to be fun. Generative AI ruins the very concept of a competition.

AI is so obnoxiously pushed into my face by all companies of the internet that it makes me sick of it, every time I read "Artificial Intelligence", it makes me want to stop reading and go do something else, even though non-generative AI used to be a subject that I found very interesting to study.

Yet, you keep that "Look! AI is cool! And we want to do AI! So we're a cool company!" mindset even though I'm clearly not the first one to have expressed disgust and lack of trust into AI.

AI usage instructions are, again, UNCLEAR

You added:

Even though the theme of this challenge relates to the use of AI technologies, we still expect your entry to be written by you.

right before:

AI assistance with coding or debugging is permitted if it is disclosed in your entry and the initial code is wholly your own.

You are literally linking to the page that says "No AI whatsoever in any context" right before saying "actually, you can use it".

Also, please refer to my answers on the post for challenge #3 and the one for challenge #2, who point out how incoherent your formulation is, which STILL hasn't been adressed (It's almost been a month!!!)

Taking feedback into account

Users have raised a lot of good feedback which we are exploring for future iterations of Challenges. Although we don’t have a timeline yet, some of our initial ideas to work on are:

• Random sorting of responses to increase the fairness of voting
• Ability to include images in the challenge entries
• More options for peer evaluation of entries

It's too late. As I have explained in my post on challenge #3, these issues needed to be addressed before the end of the experiment, to give it the highest changes to succeed. But after four weeks, all you have done is to pick three of these issues and decide you'll fix them someday, with no timeline, and leaving Challenge #4 to suffer from these like its three predecessors did.

Besides, those three ideas you plan to think on are a small portion of what's to do. If you don't want to focus on the rest, then at least, please give explanatory comments why under the answers posted on the meta posts for the three previous challenges

How do you expect someone to be able to post, for example, "an immersive 3D room experience", considering there's a 30,000 characters limit that prevents embedding more than a few hundred lines of code, no way to embed files, and a broken spam filter that will prevent you from linking to external sites besides the few whitelisted ones?

Conclusion

I will not be participating in this last challenge. Although you have guaranteed me that:

the next Challenge (challenge 4, launching today) will be the last one it's current state.

...it doesn't repair my trust, which you broke by ignoring the most important pieces of feedback other people have given you up until now, and still deciding to make the last challenge live with the problems that were raised over the past challenges.

How can I trust that SE Inc. wants to make this experiment succeed if they let it live its most important 6 weeks with barely any bugfixes?

The fun of challenges comes from being creative within constraints and finding unique solutions. People enjoy this so much so that they will often set constraints for playing a game that the game doesn't enforce to add extra difficulty. This challenge doesn't have any explicit constraints. It would be a bad challenge even if it were a writing challenge, but it's a terrible coding challenge. I couldn't even write pseudocode that would constitute a serious entry.

This entry meets the criteria:

My futuristic technology is an AI lunar rover I control with my thoughts through a neural implant using a new software language called ESP that can't be directly translated into English. The robot creates giant artworks on the moon that can be enjoyed from Earth. Here's a description of the ESP code I developed:

Imagining the art as it should appear from Earth ...
Responding to queries from the robot about details ...
Thinking about the things I want to tweak ...
End program and enter standby ...

You could simply merge two not-widely-known LeetCode or Advent of Code problems and add a bit of a funny story to it, and it would be hundreds of times better than the current 4th challenge.

While I might not consider myself a SE community member, but rather a passerby.

I like fun challenges! I was hyped to see fun challenges appearing on this website! I had fun doing Challenge 3 (I didn't notice them during Challenges 1 and 2). Despite that, I join all the negative feedback the series has gotten so far. And I am not interested in joining further with Challenge 4, due to its vagueness, and I personally find it not fun.

Although the idea of challenges appeals to me as a whole.

I have to say, this challenge feels like it’s gone a bit too far in terms of scope and clarity. I’m honestly struggling to grasp what the actual goal is, and what form the submission should take. It feels more like an open-ended brainstorming session than a focused coding challenge.

With challenges 2 and 3, I thought there was a good balance, broad enough to be creative, but still with a clear goal to work towards. Challenge 4 just doesn’t hit that mark for me.

Because of that, I won’t be entering this one. I hope future challenges can strike that clearer balance again.