This makes sense. Now I am interested to know if the scoring function can be maped from exponential into linear type function. I am not saying it is needed, but if can be done, scoreboard will look better. So we won’t see 100, 99.9997 … 99.996 etc. Neither would we see scores like this month.
In my opinion, the exponential function is all right as long as the scores aren’t too varying (that might mean, in our case, tighter constraints, for example 10,000 or even 100,000 blocks instead of only 1,000 which would eliminate quadratic algorithms). For example, in a recent problem about Santa and the presents, which was a minimization problem, the scores were rather reasonable.
Sorry, but what you have written here makes almost no sense.
You can multiply all scores by 1e9 in your first example to get bigger absolute difference, if you want to 
At practice it depends on particular problem - for some of them such scoring function works well, for some it makes no sense. Problem being about maximization or minimization is not really related to it - issues are possible with both kinds of tasks.
3 Likes