haskellwiki and Project Euler

Daniel Fischer

23 Feb 2008 23 Feb '08

11:01 p.m.

Hi all, I try not to be too rude, although I'm rather disgusted. I know there are several sites out on the web where solutions to PE problems are given. That is of course absolutely against the sporting spirit of Project Euler, but hey, not all people are sporting. I've found http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Euler_problems irritating for a while, but wasn't overly annoyed by it while it only contained code for solving a few dozen problems. Today I learnt that it now contains code for all problems. Really bad! On top of that, the code for many problems isn't even Haskell, but C, WTF! Other code was submitted without consent of the author, copied from the PE fora, which are restricted access and so, even if perhaps not legally, but in spirit, do not fall under the legitimate resources for haskellwiki: "You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!" To make matters worse still, there was a page containing nothing but the answers. That was changed, but Cale chose to reintroduce that crap. I just removed it again. Your turn, Cale. I call on the Haskell community to vote for immediate removal of these pages from the wiki! Show that you're a sporting bunch. Daniel Fischer

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Tony Morris

23 Feb 23 Feb

11:20 p.m.

Daniel Fischer wrote:

...

Hi all, I try not to be too rude, although I'm rather disgusted. I know there are several sites out on the web where solutions to PE problems are given. That is of course absolutely against the sporting spirit of Project Euler, but hey, not all people are sporting. I've found http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Euler_problems irritating for a while, but wasn't overly annoyed by it while it only contained code for solving a few dozen problems. Today I learnt that it now contains code for all problems. Really bad!

On top of that, the code for many problems isn't even Haskell, but C, WTF! Other code was submitted without consent of the author, copied from the PE fora, which are restricted access and so, even if perhaps not legally, but in spirit, do not fall under the legitimate resources for haskellwiki: "You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!"

To make matters worse still, there was a page containing nothing but the answers. That was changed, but Cale chose to reintroduce that crap. I just removed it again. Your turn, Cale.

I call on the Haskell community to vote for immediate removal of these pages from the wiki! Show that you're a sporting bunch.

Daniel Fischer _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

You're going the right way about having the answers published in more ways than just the Haskell wiki. I'm only making a prediction, not a threat. -- Tony Morris http://tmorris.net/

Daniel Fischer

11:59 p.m.

...

You're going the right way about having the answers published in more ways than just the Haskell wiki. I'm only making a prediction, not a threat.

Might be. And I've been over-angered. Having the Haskell code for the solutions in the wiki might be legitimate, but a) no code should be put there without the author's consent and b) posting C/C++ code there indicates that the reason for that is to be a spoil-sport, not to further learning/thinking Haskell. The latter even more applies to publishing the bare answers.

Philippa Cowderoy

24 Feb 24 Feb

1:08 p.m.

On Sun, 24 Feb 2008, Daniel Fischer wrote:

...

b) posting C/C++ code there indicates that the reason for that is to be a spoil-sport, not to further learning/thinking Haskell.

No, it doesn't. It provides code that people can port - an obvious step in building a more complete wiki page. -- flippa@flippac.org "The reason for this is simple yet profound. Equations of the form x = x are completely useless. All interesting equations are of the form x = y." -- John C. Baez

Yitzchak Gale

10:36 p.m.

Project Euler is excellent, lots of fun, and rewarding. Thanks to Daniel and all the other members of the team. Project Euler problems, by their nature, also happen to be excellent material for teaching and learning Haskell. Having various solutions to them on the wiki is a valuable resource for the Haskell community, in my opinion. Even without the universal quantifiers. I agree that the best way to get the most benefit out of Project Euler itself is by following the rules. So I admit to having added some prominent "spoiler warning" wrappers to the "Euler Problems" wiki pages some time ago. I haven't looked there in a while, I hope they're still there. They help those who want to "do it right" to avoid ruining it for themselves. Here are some use cases for Project Euler solutions posted to our wiki: 1. Haskell newcomers who have already solved the problems in their (former) favorite language. They'll be _amazed_ when they see it in Haskell! 2. People who have already solved a problem in Haskell, and want to see other Haskell solutions concentrated in one place. Often the forum is difficult to use in that way. 3. Someone who is using a certain specific problem for learning to program in Haskell, and has decided to trade the chance for full enjoyment of the problem as a Project Euler problem for the chance for advancement in learning Haskell. I'm not sure I would recommend that, but it is a choice that people are free to make, and appropriate for our wiki if they should so decide. I am opposed to allowing non-Haskell solutions on our wiki, except when they are clearly needed for comparison in order to make a point about Haskell. General discussions about Project Euler solutions should go elsewhere, like anything else off-topic. As for those who want to intentionally cheat - they are only hurting themselves. As others have pointed out, there are plenty of other places out there to do it. If those people think they will earn themselves any respect that way, I think they are naive. I don't feel that we should allow them to prevent _us_ from benefiting just because they decided to do that to themselves. So the bottom line is, in my opinion: o Of course, material that infringes on copyrights or licenses must go. o Non-infringing solutions in Haskell, when wrapped in appropriate spoiler warnings, further the cause of Haskell without causing any significant damage to Project Euler. They should therefore remain. o Solutions having nothing to do with Haskell are off-topic and should not be on our wiki. I hope this position admits the possibility of a continued amicable relationship with the Project Euler team. Regards, Yitz

Quân Ta

2:05 a.m.

Shame on you Haskell wiki! :) Perhaps it's a conpiracy to avoid wasting too much of the community effort on PE, and direct that energy to darcs :) - Quan

Radosław Grzanka

8:32 a.m.

2008/2/24, Daniel Fischer :

...

Hi all, I try not to be too rude, although I'm rather disgusted. I know there are several sites out on the web where solutions to PE problems are given. That is of course absolutely against the sporting spirit of Project Euler,

Actually, I've found this solutions pretty usefull. After I solved another PE problem I went there to find out how newbie I still was! And I've learned really huge amout of usefull stuff. In fact, I've put my own solution there because the one that was already on site was crappy against my newbie stuff. I hope it will be helpfull to someone else. If you are afraid about spoiling "sport spirit" of PE by someone that just copies the solution then you are naive. Just google for answer. If you are in compete with someone on PE I'm sure that if he doesn't want to be fair then he won't be fair and removing this site won't help it. Another issue is submitting someone else's code. This would anger me personally a lot! If you have evidence of such behaviour then I would vote for removing the suspected stuff immiedietly. Cheers, Radek.

Cale Gibbard

10:37 a.m.

Hello, It seems that I'm getting sucked into this argument solely due to my unwillingness to allow people to damage useful content that has been added to the Haskell wiki. This started a couple of weeks ago when a user by the name Marypoppins decided to arbitrarily remove all the Euler Problems solutions from the wiki. I treated this as vandalism and immediately reverted all the changes. I'd like to state up front that I otherwise have no personal stake in this, since the solutions pages are not ones that I've made significant contributions to, nor have I even spent a significant amount of time working on Project Euler problems. (They have not enough universal quantifiers in them for my tastes.) I do however, think it's important to not allow valid contributions to the wiki to be damaged by people without good reason. On 23/02/2008, Daniel Fischer wrote:

...

Hi all, I try not to be too rude, although I'm rather disgusted. I know there are several sites out on the web where solutions to PE problems are given. That is of course absolutely against the sporting spirit of Project Euler, but hey, not all people are sporting. I've found http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Euler_problems irritating for a while, but wasn't overly annoyed by it while it only contained code for solving a few dozen problems. Today I learnt that it now contains code for all problems. Really bad!

Why is this even the least bit bad? If you publish a bunch of problems, expect people to publish a bunch of solutions to them. They will do this regardless of what you demand, since there's educational value to others in doing so. If you're running a contest and you don't want people to be able to look up all the solutions, then simply produce a bunch of problems to which nobody has the solution, and make them available all at once, with a time limit on solving them. If you want to see how this is done correctly, have a look at what the ICFP does. If Project Euler is instead, not a contest, as people on the Talk pages on the wiki have claimed, then nobody should have any problem with publishing solutions, as the only person one could possibly cheat by looking up the solution is oneself. However, if one had already given up on solving said problem, then there would likely be significant educational value in reading a solution to it.

...

On top of that, the code for many problems isn't even Haskell, but C, WTF!

This indeed is a problem, as it is the Haskell wiki after all. However, I feel that it's more valuable to keep such solutions until such time as their Haskell counterparts are made available.

...

Other code was submitted without consent of the author, copied from the PE fora, which are restricted access and so, even if perhaps not legally, but in spirit, do not fall under the legitimate resources for haskellwiki: "You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!"

This is a legitimate concern. If the copyright of the original authors can be proved, said solutions should indeed be removed. However, any claim that the content as a whole, or the list of numeric solutions violates the copyright of PE is clearly ridiculous. The problem statements do not appear on the wiki, and the exact solutions, even if PE were to publish them (that list doesn't appear to be anywhere on the PE site), clearly qualifies as fair use.

...

To make matters worse still, there was a page containing nothing but the answers. That was changed, but Cale chose to reintroduce that crap. I just removed it again. Your turn, Cale.

I will not tolerate people coming along and arbitrarily blanking pages for inappropriate reasons like this. Sorry. Such a list of solutions would be useful to someone working on the problems, as a fast way to check their solutions, for instance. It doesn't harm people wanting to solve the problems on their own, as they can simply avoid looking at it.

...

I call on the Haskell community to vote for immediate removal of these pages from the wiki! Show that you're a sporting bunch.

I call for the opposite. Sorry. - Cale

Daniel Fischer

12:28 p.m.

Am Sonntag, 24. Februar 2008 11:37 schrieb Cale Gibbard:

...

Hello,

It seems that I'm getting sucked into this argument solely due to my unwillingness to allow people to damage useful content that has been added to the Haskell wiki.

I'm sorry, I was angry that someone posted my code on that page and over-reacted. I apologize.

...

This started a couple of weeks ago when a user by the name Marypoppins decided to arbitrarily remove all the Euler Problems solutions from the wiki. I treated this as vandalism and immediately reverted all the changes.

I'd like to state up front that I otherwise have no personal stake in this, since the solutions pages are not ones that I've made significant contributions to, nor have I even spent a significant amount of time working on Project Euler problems. (They have not enough universal quantifiers in them for my tastes.)

I do however, think it's important to not allow valid contributions to the wiki to be damaged by people without good reason.

Agreed, and the page with the code may indeed be considered a valid contribution. However, it certainly would be more valuable if it wasn't bare code, but also included explanations of the mathematical or programmatical ideas behind it. The page with just the answers I cannot but find worthless.

...

Why is this even the least bit bad? If you publish a bunch of problems, expect people to publish a bunch of solutions to them. They will do this regardless of what you demand, since there's educational value to others in doing so.

The educational value would be more visible if the code was explained, but okay.

...

If Project Euler is instead, not a contest, as people on the Talk pages on the wiki have claimed, then nobody should have any problem with publishing solutions, as the only person one could possibly cheat by looking up the solution is oneself. However, if one had already given up on solving said problem, then there would likely be significant educational value in reading a solution to it.

...
On top of that, the code for many problems isn't even Haskell, but C, WTF!

This indeed is a problem, as it is the Haskell wiki after all. However, I feel that it's more valuable to keep such solutions until such time as their Haskell counterparts are made available.

I disagree, more valuable would be an explanation of the ideas behind it, and perhaps contrasting a C (python,...) programme with a Haskell one to highlight the different approaches.

...

...
Other code was submitted without consent of the author, copied from the PE fora, which are restricted access and so, even if perhaps not legally, but in spirit, do not fall under the legitimate resources for haskellwiki: "You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!"

This is a legitimate concern. If the copyright of the original authors can be proved, said solutions should indeed be removed.

PE has a share-alike license, the very least to be demanded if someone posts other's code is proper attribution. Daniel

Philippa Cowderoy

12:35 p.m.

On Sun, 24 Feb 2008, Daniel Fischer wrote:

...

Agreed, and the page with the code may indeed be considered a valid contribution. However, it certainly would be more valuable if it wasn't bare code, but also included explanations of the mathematical or programmatical ideas behind it.

The page with just the answers I cannot but find worthless.

As this is a wiki we're talking about, feel free to add content? Taking things off it because they're not everything you want them to be is definitely not appropriate, and "not valuable enough yet" generally has little place in discussions about whether content belongs. -- flippa@flippac.org "I think you mean Philippa. I believe Phillipa is the one from an alternate universe, who has a beard and programs in BASIC, using only gotos for control flow." -- Anton van Straaten on Lambda the Ultimate

Rodrigo Queiro

12:53 p.m.

The only time I have found the solutions page useful is when I was working on problem 100, which I'd been thinking about on and off for several months. Eventually, I gave up and looked at the solution there, and was absolutely none the wiser as to how it was solved! I thought about it more over the next few months, and eventually just copied and ran that program, put it into PE, and looked at the forum, and finally understood how I should have solved the problem. Without the solutions page, I would probably never have been able to solve the problem, and would know even less about Diophantine Equations than I currently do. However, the only value was the actual numerical solution, since when I have solved a problem myself and want to see if my answer could be improved, I just look in the forum where I can see a range of methods of solution instead of just one. That said, I vote to keep the solutions (providing they are written by the page editor) since IMO they do no harm. On 24/02/2008, Daniel Fischer wrote:

...

Am Sonntag, 24. Februar 2008 11:37 schrieb Cale Gibbard:

...
Hello,

It seems that I'm getting sucked into this argument solely due to my unwillingness to allow people to damage useful content that has been added to the Haskell wiki.

I'm sorry, I was angry that someone posted my code on that page and over-reacted. I apologize.

...
This started a couple of weeks ago when a user by the name Marypoppins decided to arbitrarily remove all the Euler Problems solutions from the wiki. I treated this as vandalism and immediately reverted all the changes.

I'd like to state up front that I otherwise have no personal stake in this, since the solutions pages are not ones that I've made significant contributions to, nor have I even spent a significant amount of time working on Project Euler problems. (They have not enough universal quantifiers in them for my tastes.)

I do however, think it's important to not allow valid contributions to the wiki to be damaged by people without good reason.

Agreed, and the page with the code may indeed be considered a valid contribution. However, it certainly would be more valuable if it wasn't bare code, but also included explanations of the mathematical or programmatical ideas behind it.

The page with just the answers I cannot but find worthless.

...
Why is this even the least bit bad? If you publish a bunch of problems, expect people to publish a bunch of solutions to them. They will do this regardless of what you demand, since there's educational value to others in doing so.

The educational value would be more visible if the code was explained, but okay.

...
If Project Euler is instead, not a contest, as people on the Talk pages on the wiki have claimed, then nobody should have any problem with publishing solutions, as the only person one could possibly cheat by looking up the solution is oneself. However, if one had already given up on solving said problem, then there would likely be significant educational value in reading a solution to it.

...
On top of that, the code for many problems isn't even Haskell, but C, WTF!

This indeed is a problem, as it is the Haskell wiki after all. However, I feel that it's more valuable to keep such solutions until such time as their Haskell counterparts are made available.

I disagree, more valuable would be an explanation of the ideas behind it, and perhaps contrasting a C (python,...) programme with a Haskell one to highlight the different approaches.

...
...
Other code was submitted without consent of the author, copied from

the

...
...
PE fora, which are restricted access and so, even if perhaps not legally, but in spirit, do not fall under the legitimate resources for haskellwiki: "You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!"

This is a legitimate concern. If the copyright of the original authors can be proved, said solutions should indeed be removed.

PE has a share-alike license, the very least to be demanded if someone posts other's code is proper attribution.

Daniel

_______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

Chaddaï Fouché

2:35 p.m.

2008/2/24, Rodrigo Queiro :

...

The only time I have found the solutions page useful is when I was working on problem 100, which I'd been thinking about on and off for several months. Eventually, I gave up and looked at the solution there, and was absolutely none the wiser as to how it was solved! I thought about it more over the next few months, and eventually just copied and ran that program, put it into PE, and looked at the forum, and finally understood how I should have solved the problem.

Without the solutions page, I would probably never have been able to solve the problem, and would know even less about Diophantine Equations than I currently do. However, the only value was the actual numerical solution, since when I have solved a problem myself and want to see if my answer could be improved, I just look in the forum where I can see a range of methods of solution instead of just one.

That said, I vote to keep the solutions (providing they are written by the page editor) since IMO they do no harm.

I agree with this (I personally contributed some small solutions and tried to at least comment them a minimum), but I noticed a smartass replaced valid solutions by references to the sequences dictionary... As the goal of PE is to solve the question by program (at least in my understanding), I feel this qualify as vandalism... especially as the program replaced whatever their value were in Haskell whereas the sequence dictionary has no relation to Haskell. Otherwise I don't see where the fact that this page exists is in any way harmful or unsporting, I never looked it up before solving a question by myself but have found it valuable to check my solution against. -- Jedaï

Cale Gibbard

3:27 p.m.

On 24/02/2008, Chaddaï Fouché wrote:

...

2008/2/24, Rodrigo Queiro :

...
That said, I vote to keep the solutions (providing they are written by the page editor) since IMO they do no harm.

I agree with this (I personally contributed some small solutions and tried to at least comment them a minimum), but I noticed a smartass replaced valid solutions by references to the sequences dictionary... As the goal of PE is to solve the question by program (at least in my understanding), I feel this qualify as vandalism... especially as the program replaced whatever their value were in Haskell whereas the sequence dictionary has no relation to Haskell.

I encourage you to put your solutions back up, that would be good. Referencing OEIS is a bit of a cheesy way to do things. (Though if it's going to be done, one could at least make use of the excellent Math.OEIS library :) - Cale

Chaddaï Fouché

3:33 p.m.

2008/2/24, Cale Gibbard :

...

I encourage you to put your solutions back up, that would be good. Referencing OEIS is a bit of a cheesy way to do things. (Though if it's going to be done, one could at least make use of the excellent Math.OEIS library :)

Indeed !! But I don't think any of my solutions was replaced, I just noticed this. -- Jedaï

Rodrigo Queiro

4:03 p.m.

What really puzzles me is that while Dan referred to the sporting spirit of PE, this really doesn't seem to be a spirit embodied by many of the users. Reading through the forum will reveal the first few posts to be of the form "wrote a crappy brute force solver for the first few terms, searched OEIS, 'solved'". I really don't understand why someone would do that. On 24/02/2008, Chaddaï Fouché wrote:

...

2008/2/24, Rodrigo Queiro :

...
The only time I have found the solutions page useful is when I was working on problem 100, which I'd been thinking about on and off for several months. Eventually, I gave up and looked at the solution there, and was absolutely none the wiser as to how it was solved! I thought about it more over the next few months, and eventually just copied and ran that program, put it into PE, and looked at the forum, and finally understood how I should have solved the problem.

Without the solutions page, I would probably never have been able to solve the problem, and would know even less about Diophantine Equations than I currently do. However, the only value was the actual numerical solution, since when I have solved a problem myself and want to see if my answer could be improved, I just look in the forum where I can see a range of methods of solution instead of just one.

That said, I vote to keep the solutions (providing they are written by the page editor) since IMO they do no harm.

I agree with this (I personally contributed some small solutions and tried to at least comment them a minimum), but I noticed a smartass replaced valid solutions by references to the sequences dictionary... As the goal of PE is to solve the question by program (at least in my understanding), I feel this qualify as vandalism... especially as the program replaced whatever their value were in Haskell whereas the sequence dictionary has no relation to Haskell.

Otherwise I don't see where the fact that this page exists is in any way harmful or unsporting, I never looked it up before solving a question by myself but have found it valuable to check my solution against.

-- Jedaï

Cale Gibbard

12:57 p.m.

On 24/02/2008, Daniel Fischer wrote:

...

Am Sonntag, 24. Februar 2008 11:37 schrieb Cale Gibbard:

...
This is a legitimate concern. If the copyright of the original authors can be proved, said solutions should indeed be removed.

PE has a share-alike license, the very least to be demanded if someone posts other's code is proper attribution.

To clarify, everything on the wiki is implicitly published under a simple permissive license which is avilable here: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HaskellWiki:Copyrights If code cannot be made available under that license, it indeed should be removed. - Cale

Philippa Cowderoy

1:20 p.m.

On Sun, 24 Feb 2008, Daniel Fischer wrote:

...

Hi all, I try not to be too rude, although I'm rather disgusted. I know there are several sites out on the web where solutions to PE problems are given. That is of course absolutely against the sporting spirit of Project Euler, but hey, not all people are sporting.

What sporting spirit? The site itself doesn't indicate any such thing whatsoever and doesn't ask that people don't post solutions - as such, anything you have to say here is entirely about the culture on the forums there, not the problem set itself. As such, you've taken it upon yourself to enforce the spirit of your PE participation upon others. That's far from sporting and in direct violation of the spirit of the wiki. Let people play how they choose.

...

Other code was submitted without consent of the author

Can you demonstrate this? A statement from the author that they didn't consent, for example? -- flippa@flippac.org 'In Ankh-Morpork even the shit have a street to itself... Truly this is a land of opportunity.' - Detritus, Men at Arms

Daniel Fischer

25 Feb 25 Feb

2:31 p.m.

Am Sonntag, 24. Februar 2008 14:20 schrieb Philippa Cowderoy: (reordered quotes)

...

...
Other code was submitted without consent of the author

Can you demonstrate this? A statement from the author that they didn't consent, for example?

Well, some of my code was there, without my consent. That tipped an already rotten temper over and led to disproportionate anger and an inappropriate reaction which I regret.

...

What sporting spirit? The site itself doesn't indicate any such thing whatsoever and doesn't ask that people don't post solutions - as such, anything you have to say here is entirely about the culture on the forums there, not the problem set itself.

True, there's no explicit "Don't post your solutions anywhere but in the problem threads". However, I always understood it as implicitly given that for sites like PE it is not desired that you give away the answers. That is of course no legal matter, but the way I was brought up, such things are simply not done.

...

As such, you've taken it upon yourself to enforce the spirit of your PE participation upon others. That's far from sporting and in direct violation of the spirit of the wiki. Let people play how they choose.

I haven't the power to enforce my view upon others, and what I did was -- in an unbecoming manner, admittedly -- to ask others to support my views (let me repeat, overstated due to a state of arousal).

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participants (9)

Cale Gibbard
Chaddaï Fouché
Daniel Fischer
Philippa Cowderoy
Quân Ta
Radosław Grzanka
Rodrigo Queiro
Tony Morris
Yitzchak Gale