I love programming, I love your website and I love challenges that have been proposed since I registered on the website. In fact, during times when no new challenges, I was impatient waiting for new ones.

But it saddens me the line you are taking. New challenges are becoming specialists in specific exercises for certain topics, in this case, image processing. No longer rewards the knowledge and skills in programming, but specific knowledge.

I sincerely hope that once again back reward programming.

Hello Hawkin, I understand your point of view.

Well what we tried was to extend a bit the scope and to progressively introduce new concepts in steps (like Blurring the line was relatively easy and not really specific to images, although we used images to make it concretely understandable). The idea is to introduce everyone to new domains with progressively more sophisticated puzzles, so that the contest also acts as a learning experience.

Now the Deblurring the lines is a specialist problem but is made in such a way that it gives a chance even to people that never worked on image processing. Just with a hacker spirit (and no real knowledge of image processing) we could write a test solution for it that gives a decent score.

However for level expert problems, no matter what it's going to take a specialist to some degree or a lot of thinking. Similarly The Caribbean Salesman is really a graph specialist type of problem. We could put some number theory problems too for Expert (like it's often the case in international competitions) but then it would also take a math specialist to solve them.

That's why we reluctantly add expert problems, but this time with so many tied for the top we had to introduce some puzzle to break the tie.

Let's discuss some suggestions about programming topics, I've just created a forum thread for that:
http://codercharts.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=3009

Thanks for the feedback

For what it's worth, Hawkin, I managed to get in a good submission on the deblurring problem, and I had never worked in image processing before this contest. I learned the material as I went. It's possible that choosing problems topically might, on occasion, give certain people an edge--but isn't that the case in most problems? If you ask graph theoretic things (like the currency problems of this same contest), you'll favor those who have a strong background in that sort of task. Same for number theoretic problems--you'll reward the more mathematically-inclined users.

Consider how long this contest was--we had over a week to work on deblurring. A week is certainly long enough to pick up some background material, so even if some contestants had known all about how to sharpen images in advance, it does not take long to read up on the subject and choose an approach. The rest of the contest is in implementing your approach--and even an image processing specialist would have to do this.