At flooble there are 40 problems in the queue. (this may not be true but lets just pretend it is.) A few crazy hackers somehow manage to promote themselves to scholars. On the first day the first hacker will vote thumbs up on all problems displayed.(The 10 most recent) On the second day the second hacker votes thumbs down on every second problem. On the third day the third hacker votes thumbs up on every third problem. And so on and so on. (When it gets to the eleventh day the eleventh hacker will do what the first hacker did)

How many days will it take for every problem in the queue to be live on the site?

Note: For those who don't know there are only 10 problems that can be voted thumbs up or thumbs down every day and these problems are the 10 least recent. Also a problem with three thumbs up will be posted to the site and taken out of queue. Only one problem can be posted to the site per day. Also if a problem gets 3 thumbs down it is deleted.

Btw: for those who like an extra challenge what if one problem is submitted every 3 days?

Also: A hacker will always vote before a problem becomes live.

(In reply to re(2): To restate everything by fwaff)

fwaff and I have compared notes, and the difference in our procedures is that on a day on which a puzzle that the preceding day already had +3 net votes but did not get posted now gets posted, I had that posting take place before the days voting, while fwaff kept that puzzle in for the voting and possibly took a hit bringing it down to +2, keeping that negative vote (or positive one in possible instances) from going to a different puzzle. Perhaps as those are indeed often negative votes and the non-+3 is less resilient, my solution resulted in 2 rejections while fwaff's resulted in only 1. Both ended with the last post on day 181.

For example, at the end of day 11 we agree that the situation is
11 21P0313XP20Vqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq
(using a coding scheme described previously)
At the end of day 12, I have posted that first 3:
12 20P0P03YP2X0Vqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq
while fwaff's algorithm subjected it to a negative vote, thus changing the parity of all the puzzles that follow:
12 20P0212XP10Xqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq
It's another question of how the process actually works.

Posted by Charlie on 2003-03-03 16:18:32