I guess ( reading message http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AlZimmermannsProgrammingContests/message/1313 ) this contest is supposed to continue a series of Al Zimmermann's Programming Contests. If so, I suggest to look at the older contest problem at http://members.aol.com/bitzenbeitz/Contests/ to an impression on what type of problems the participants are expecting. Max N. J. A. Sloane wrote:
To Seqfans, Mathfun: the people who are planning the contest (I should probably not have described them as French, although my contact has a French email address - they could be anywhere in the world) replied that none of the sequences that I gave them were suitable. Either they failed to meet some of the requirements for a good challenge, or else they were too close to problems that had been used in previous challenges.
So they are still looking for a good sequence to extend. Something like the Hadamard determinant problem or the Golomb ruler problem would be perfect, but these have already been used.
Here are the constraints on the problem:
1) It must be NP-complete 2) It must be simple to describe 3) It should not have been widely explored 4) A solution must be easy to check (= it doesn't require a lot of computation to check) 5) It has to be computed from N=8 to at most 64
Further suggestions would be welcomed!
Neil