Will programs be required to use the same algorithm as other programs?
One of the requirements for the Computer Language Benchmarks Game is that programs are supposed to be using the same (rough) algorithm. Are these benchmarks going to have a similar requirement?

This is a noble goal but in practice it seems to be pretty hard to enforce. There have been many occasions on the Computer Language Benchmarks Game where a program has been accepted only to find out much later that the program was actually using a considerably different algorithm requiring it (and possibly other programs based on it) to be removed. People need to manually check the programs to see if they are using different algorithms and this is hard and time consuming to do so it isn't done as much as we would like.

Additionally some programming languages such as functional languages (like Haskell) can require considerably different algorithms to solve problems. There are also some grey areas where it doesn't become quite so clear if something is using a different algorithm or not. This might include things like rewriting algorithms to use multithreading or SIMD.

Because of these issues, I personally would suggest giving program authors flexibility with the algorithms they use. Over the long run, people will determine optimal algorithms to solve the problems and those optimal algorithms will be adopted by most of the programs anyway.