Rules

§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 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

§3

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

§4

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.

§5

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

§6

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

§7

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

§8

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.

§9

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.

§10

Only windows with positive numbers give points. Window -1 is available, but is not part of the contest. To prevent forcing people having to spend their precious time on trivialities on weekends or a day as holy as Christmas eve, such days are considered negatively numbered. Non-scored windows are marked as such by having a Christmassy green color instead of a festive red.

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.