We are now three-quarters of the way through this year’s Advent Calendar Challenge – yet again we have Santa appearing for the first time before day 24. A quick glance reveals that 2014 was the last time Santa made it’s first appearance on Christmas Eve. The downside is no-one scored today, but that was kinda predictable! I didn’t make the calendar so it’s obviously out of my control!
A quick note on the matters raised in the previous post. On dummy/red-herring answers, I will think about this before the 2020 challenge further, maybe with some thinking-out-loud analysis: watch this space! On the other matter, on whether to hide guesses after day 18 or not, I have a compromise. The compromise was partially inspired when I was asked by a competitor privately if I would hide guesses or not. I replied I intended to leave things as they were (i.e. hidden after window 18) and that I would make the announcement in this blog post today. The competitor pointed out that I had just given them a possible advantage in that they could now take a copy of everyone’s guesses, knowing what was about to come. It got me thinking – whilst it’s a slight advantage only because everyone could take such a copy at any time, there’s a half-way approach between the two I asked you to choose between in the last post, and it is that approach that I have settled on.
So from now on*, guesses made after the opening of window 18 will be hidden. Guesses made before that point will not be. Trial basis, and we’ll see how it goes.
Six days left. Good luck everyone!
-* it’s not been implemented properly – the official rules pdf is pending update, and the censorship still applies on individual profile pages. Those will be fixed tomorrow!