Contest Code.. A Waste?

Why is the contest for a script that has no real world purpose. Why waste these people time on scrabble. Why not have them code a shopping cart, and organizer or something usable. Then everyone wins. The coder wins and the visitors get a useful script. What are everyone elses thoughts on this?

Well, I think you're wrong. This contest is not a waste of time. It takes brains to solve these problems. A shoppingcart system is too easy.
BTW, how do you judge a shopping cart system?

Tell me how many algorithms there are possible for a shopping cart!

Applications are MUCH simpler to do than contest problems usually... And an organizer, yes, we're going to do some probability analysis in that are we?

Pfffftttt!

Besides that, I guarantee there are TONS of shopping cart/organizer scripts already out there. And, if someone wanted a high-performance algorithm that one of our contests happened to do, that person would be saved TONS of time! Making an algorithm is much harder than just writing a script that does a common task.

I knew I would get flamed for this post.
But really there has to be some real world application that can be coded that other people can use.

This is like watching David Letterman's Human tricks. It takes a ton of skill to juggle 10 chain saws. I would never try it myself. But what is the point? Does it help anyone? This is a forum to help people. Scrabble does not help anyone.

BTW. I posted this under my real name not anonymous. So I take the flaming like a man. But understand this is mental gymnastics. not beat up the poster

I got flamed before when I first complained against the output portion, when it first started.

Besides that, these contests actually do more than most contests I join. www.usaco.org <-- more abstract algorithms than this (so if you thought scrabble was not applicable to real life, wait till you see these problems).

www.topcoder.com <-- also, usually unusable problem ideas (the hard ones actually; the easy ones just involve parsing and sorting)

Okey,

I agree with you that all those games are a bit bor(e)ing. And like webhappy said: There are TONS of shopping cart systems, so how do you know wether or not the script is programmed by the submitter himself?

I can see both sides, but here are my views. WHat this is is to see who is the best coder by giving out hard challenges that can have varying results. These require tons of thinking so you can't just sit down and write it. It isn't intended to be useful, someone can ask for a script if they want useful. This is for fun.

Yea,
Your right also. It is for fun. But some of the people who come to this site are so flushed with talent that I would like to see them produce a useful app. But I geuss that the solving of a game is more difficult than -- say, an invoicing system or something. I have always respected someone that know more than I. I guess solving the game takes intelligence and not just knowledge. Many times people mistake knowledge for intelligence. Thats like mistaking a glass of milk for a cow. It does in fact take intelligence to solve a game.

And Jordan, By The Way.. Your english is terrific better than most that English is their fisrt language

I tried my best to not post to this thread. But I couldn't resist

Remember the PHP Open Source Challenge? No? Let me refresh your memory. It was a contest that I started that would produce a real world application. The first challenge was to create a search application that would provide search results for static pages and database data.

You know how many entries I got? A big fat zero. Not a single entry. Ohh..I did get two entries that came in several days late.

Anyway, just thought I'd mention that I did try. People just didn't like it .

These games are more fun to judge anyway ;)

OK, Point taken.

You give up too easy ;)

Well its your site. Your the final word.

Bring back the useful contests!! I saw the Google Search thing, but I couldn't wrap my brain around the idea of doing some code that just filters output from someone else's code.

Give us another chance! Remember Matt... we love you.

you know what i don't like about these contests? ..THERE'S TO MANY RULES MAN. i gotz teh pr0bl3m w1t au+h0ri+y