Ladder rankings would need less simulations if new code a player submits would start to be ranked against players that have roughly the same score.
Also, if after a few wins or fails in a row it jumped further through the ladder, that would be efficient too.
the word “bisection” comes to mind…
Yeah, you’re right. I think it’s on @schmatz’s mind to come up with a better algorithm for doing this that would let you move both up and down the score chain instead of just up, which would then allow us to do bisection things.