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 four levels of tie-breaking. These are, in order of decreasing importance, number of solved challenges, total acquired challenge score, discrete time reduction and finally exact time of last solved challenge.

§3

Everyone is welcome to participate as long as they haven't been part of building the dJulkalendern.

§4

When a window is released, it may at first only be solved individually, meaning cooperation is forbidden. 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 judges reserve the right to at any moment change or append information to challenges.

§7

The solution will always be a single English word. It is not case sensitive.

§8

It is not allowed to hinder other players from participating in dJulkalendern. This includes but is not limited to disrupting access to various services that we host.

§9

It is not allowed to "hack" or otherwise attack this site (djulkalendern.se), only its challenges which are on djul.se.

§10

It is not allowed to use bruteforce on the solution page to try to solve a window. For example, simply inputting part of a dictionary, large list of words, or similar, is not allowed.

§11

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 a day as holy as Christmas eve, 24 is considered a negative number. 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 Reduction

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 added to their DTR-score.

p(t) = min(5, ceil(log2(t/15 + 1) - 1)),
t := minutes passed since the release of the challenge.

Less is more, i.e. a lower score precedes 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 a user's last solved date.