Rules

These are the rules of dJulkalendern
Any violations may result in penalties

§0

The judges have the final say.

§1

A new challenge will be made available every weekday up to Christmas Eve. The windows open at 12:15 CET.

§2

The solution will always be a single English word, and the solution is not case-sensitive.

§3

The scoring system has five levels of tie-breaking. These are, in order of decreasing importance:

number of solved challenges
total aquired challenge score
weighted discrete time deduction
unweighted discrete time deduction
exact time of last solved challenge

§4

To prevent forcing people to spend their precious time on trivialities on weekends, non-existing days, or a day as holy as Christmas Eve, such windows are considered non-scored and not part of the contest. Scored windows are marked as such by having a festive dAnkan icon.

§5

Everyone is welcome to join, provided they have not participated in the creation of dJulkalendern.

§6

When a window is released, it may at first only be solved individually, meaning cooperation is forbidden. When the time deduction that will be received when solving a window is 3 or higher, exactly 105 minutes later (which is at 14:00 CET if the window released at 12:15 CET) this restriction is lifted and cooperation is both allowed and encouraged.

§7

You are not allowed to share the solution or provide step by step instructions while cooperating at any point of the competition.

§8

The use of the internet, AI, and various types of decoders is allowed.

§9

It is not allowed to obstruct others from participating in the dJulkalendern. This includes, but not limited to, disrupting access to various pages and services we provide.

§10

It is not allowed to brute-force your way to an answer for a window. For example, using a bot or manually entering as many words as possible from a dictionary or similar sources is not permitted.

§11

The judges reserve the right to add or change information on a window at any time.

Tie-breakers

Solved Challenges

The number of challenges a user has solved.

Discrete Time Deduction

A battle of duckies should not be determined by milliseconds. It requires a more... discrete solution. For each challenge a user solves, $p (t)$ will be calculated, where:

p (t) = \min (5, ⌈ \log_{2} (\frac{t}{15} + 1) - 1 ⌉)

$t =$ minutes passed since the release of the challenge.

Weighted: $p (t)$ will be multiplied by the challenge's difficulty modifier (indicated by the amount of ducks), and count towards the user's weighted time deduction.

Unweighted: $p (t)$ is taken directly and counts count towards the user's unweighted time deduction.

These are summed up and users with a lower total score precede those with a higher one.

Exact Time of Last Solution

Some battles call for escalating discretion... As a final tie-breaker we'll therefore use the exact timestamp of when the last released window was solved.