Dear Geoff,

As promised, some comments on the puzzles for the BEP site.
All times are in hours. [snip]

1) Daily Quiz
-------------

The "Big Game" part is not very well specified, but the basic idea
is quite easy to implement. I'm not really sure how the timer should
work, and I propose that we not implement it. I think the best idea is to
have:

	- A Perl script to generate the quiz page from today's questions (in a file somewhere)
	- A Perl script to mark the answers
	- A Perl script to enter into the big game
	- A Perl script to upload each new question file/perform maintenance

How do players get details of their standing in the big game? This is not
specified at the moment. Do they get their percentage score, or a ranking
("you are 10th of 150 players"). Generating a ranking dynamically in a
reasonable time may be a problem (we might need an ODBC database).
Whatever, we also need

	- A script to report progress in the big game.

Time : 10-14 hours
	+4 hours if we need to implement an ODBC database for the big game


2) Jigsaw
---------

I think that this would work very well as a Javascript game. This would
limit it to NS 3.0+ and MSIE 4.0, but I think it would be worth it. We
would need:

	- A page of HTML + javascript to implement the game
	  (using the "shuffling" approach)
	- A mechanism to change images.

If we insist that a human cuts up each week's (?) picture into the correct
number of pieces (I would like to fix that now at either 15 or 24) then the
update mechanism is a lot easier. Note that the update mechanism will need
to be used by someone who knows about graphics.

Time:	8 hours for script
	2 hours for update mechanism
	+4-8 hours if we need to cut up a picture on the server


3) Link Word
------------

Easy to do with CGI using Perl. We would need:

	- A script to generate the quiz page
	- A script to mark it
	- A script to maintain the quiz

Time: 4-6 hours


4) Word Search
--------------

I think that Java would be best for this puzzle and the quickest way to
get hold of an applet is off the web. The relevant issues for such an
applet is

	1) Cost
	2) Whether the original author is clearly marked
	3) Whether we can resell the code
	4) Quality/features of implementation

[snip]


5) Cross Word
-------------

I do not have the original specification for this system, but we need to
generate and display/mark crossword puzzles. As with the Word Search, I
have looked at some of the applets available on the web to see if they
might fit our needs. Head and shoulders above the rest (_and_ you can
view it through a firewall) is:

[snip]

Costs
-----

The total of the individual costs are :

Total time : 24 - 30 hours
+ 	       8 - 12 hours if we need an ODBC database and more
 					     sophisticated maintainance scripts.

Price in brackets are the costs for the appropriate number of hours work.

[snip]

I would prefer that you talked to the applet writers listed above to
organise licensing their code. I also think that we need to discuss
exactly what is entailed by the "Big Game" part of the quiz application.

If I get the go ahead soon, I can promise to deliver these 3 puzzles by
Monday 8th June (I am already booked for a couple of days next week).

Let me know what you think...

Myles