If you want to come up with your own solutions, have a go at Project Euler - there are a lot of problems that do not depend on complex libraries, yet are challenging to optimize. Otherwise, try to come up with scoring criteria that you consider adequate to filter or rank the existing contributions in the shootout (or outside it - for example, there are ShedSkin and Cython solutions to some of the problems, which are "unofficial" because these languages are not included).