[DanBC]

I see a few people saying that they didn't have much time (or that they didn't want to spend too much time) for this.

Is that really actually true, or is it some kind of 'modesty'[1]?

When people talk about IQ there's usually a list of people saying something like "IQ is meaningless, it's a flawed concept (but my IQ is 138)". Are there any people saying "I worked really hard at this, I spent a lot of time and effort. I ranked 984th."?

Because I'd love to see the results if those smart people got together and spent some serious time and effort on it.

Lots of popular science projects suffer from a heavy churn rate, which leads to people being introduced to the subject, producing an introductory program, doing a bit of reading, but then moving onto something else. A few people stay, and work on intermediate and advanced level projects, but they suffer from lack of interest and expertise. See, for example, all the millions of artificial life / evolution softwares derived from Martin Gardners Bugs. (See also the death of Fractint, which was excellent software but did not transition to Linux or Windows or modern display programming.)

[1] Not the right word but I'm not sure what fits.

[ajays]

I didn't participate, but there's also the concept of "sour grapes". If one wins, then one describes how hard fought and thought out the victory was; if one loses, then one says one didn't spend much time on it at all ("if only I had more time...").

It's a way to placate the ego. :)

[cpeterso]

Netlix's movie rating prediction contest is a great example of smart teams collaborating. As the contest progressed some teams would join forces forming new hybrid algorithms.

[tvorryn]

Yeah. In this competition collaboration was discouraged. That does keep politics/alliance building skills out of the equation at the cost of worse overall final products.