and also the one of 431 other players :-)

Great mathematical elegance, but a trade-off with code readability/ maintainability since it could confuse coders not as good in maths.

Well done👌🏻

Yes

oh yeah!that's it

Maybe they didnt even start yet. The process might take some time I believe.

Seems fine, although I wonder, why older solutions are validated again

It was pretty difficult to get it right, because of all the recursion that was going on my solution. I replaced it with a slightly slower solution that does not need exceptions at all. Try it now.

Notifications about changes in completed beta kata would be awesome. Currently if you screwed up, the chance to recover the rating is pretty low because most people who solved it would not be aware of their solution being invalidated or about aspects that got fixed that previously led to a negative vote.

Thanks for sharing your reasoning, Kacarott. I understand the technical reasons for creating a new challenge, especially with drastic performance changes. However, I still believe that, whenever possible, we should aim to improve and update existing challenges, and encourage the community to update their votes and feedback. This would help us maintain a high standard of quality and foster a culture of continuous improvement.

I agree that the quality and accurate ranking of the challenge are most important. My concern was less about "free points" and more about recognizing the community's ongoing engagement. Perhaps we could explore better ways to notify users about significant updates and encourage them to revisit and re-evaluate challenges.
Ultimately, I hope we can find a balance that both ensures challenge quality and values community input.

Fixed the bug. Around 4000 values were incorrect.

rather than taking the easy and ultimately incorrect route

I suggested making a new kata, because the performance requirements were increased drastically, invalidating virtually all of the existing solutions to the previous kata. That makes this kata effectively a "performance version" of the last one, requiring satisfaction votes and rank votes to be recast, which would cast doubt on any final judgement of difficulty, as to whether votes are still skewed by the old version.

Moreover, this approach overlooks rewarding those who solved the original version of the challenge.

People not getting free points for a kata being potentially approved at a much higher rank than they solved it, is not really a high consideration when it comes to the beta process. The quality of the kata and accurate rankings are much more important.

The reference solution is mostly correct, but it is failing on some values.

The reference solution expects $37$ for $n = 119065$. However, there is a way to make it with $36$ ones:

119065 = ((4*3*5*2+1)*3)*((3*3*3*3+1)*4)+1 \\
((4+3+5+2+1)+3)+((3+3+3+3+1)+4)+1=36

In the above, the non-zero numbers can be replaced by the addition of ones. For example, $4 = (1+1+1+1)$.

It's disappointing that the moderators suggested creating a new challenge. It seems they opted for the simpler approach instead of trusting the community to revise their votes. While I understand that many users don’t update their votes, this issue should be tackled directly rather than taking the easy and ultimately incorrect route.