suggestion/idea: consider gas efficiency when evaluating submissions

[Dhaiwat10]

currently everyone who has completed all the 9 challenges has the exact same score

i know this is not fair because i'm sure 100% people submitted more gas efficient submission than mine :P

it would be v cool if we could consider gas efficiency when evaluating submissions and give out points accordingly!

[Dhaiwat10]

happy to help out with this/ work on this if you guys think this is a good idea!

[escottalexander]

Thanks for the suggestion. This is actually already how we rank users on the leaderboard (using the gas used as a secondary value to break ties in points). I realize that it is not obvious and I would love to hear more suggestions about how to display that to users. It would be difficult to show a single score that included both gas and points because you want your gas to be low and your point to be high. Would it just make sense to show a new column in the leaderboard that showed total gas used?

[escottalexander]

Looping in @swellander to this conversation. Context: Currently the leaderboard is ranked first by points and then by who has the lowest gas used total. At the very least, I think it would be nice to show the total gas used as a new column on the leaderboard. Another option would be to dynamically calculate the score based on gas used (and points). I don't know how we could do that without assuming an upper limit (maybe that would work?).

This connection between rank and total gas used need to be more apparent as well.

[Dhaiwat10]

@escottalexander oh i had no idea, thanks for the context

i guess a notice about the fact that this is how the rankings are decided would be a good start

not sure about the total gas used column but that wouldn't hurt for sure

[swellander]

Nice, yeah I think the quick and easy version would be to add the extra Total Gas Used column to show how the ties are broken. Maybe with a little tool tip explanation if we still think it's not obvious enough. And/or we could add a note about gas efficiency to the challenge descriptions.

For the second option, factoring gas efficiency into the total score, we could use the gas amount as a multiplier on a curve, so submissions that use a lot of gas just approach a score of zero. If we go with this option, I think we'll want to add an explanation of how the score is calculated, both on the website and in the CLI.

For either option though we should add some sort of breakdown in the CLI on the progress page, so users can see how much gas each challenge used.

Also glad to work on this.

[escottalexander]

I think it might be understood more easily if we just show the total gas used column like you suggested. @swellander Would you be interested in adding this to the CLI and website?

[Dhaiwat10]

now that i think about it again

why not just adjust the points according to the gas efficiency?

use the 'points' as a single rating system for the leaderboard?

[escottalexander]

now that i think about it again

why not just adjust the points according to the gas efficiency?

use the 'points' as a single rating system for the leaderboard?

The problems I see with this after thinking about it are these:

• Need to explain how points are calculated (If we are showing the gas used then they know exactly how much gas they need to save in order to move up a slot)
• We would have to have an assumption of a maximum or minimum amount of gas and this means that whenever someone makes a score outside of those then everyones score would need to be reassessed.

If we just show points and a new "total gas used" column, people will understand pretty quickly that less gas means greater rank. Also, as I mentioned they will know exactly how much they need to optimize to move up on the leaderboard.