I think it would be a good system to be able to see peek at the code of only those programs which have lower scores than your own. This way, you can have some insight into the problem without being able to easily cheat.

Or, maybe you should only be able to see those at least $x bytes longer than your own.

This idea have been discussed before, in this long dead thread, about the closing of challenges. No consensus or conclusion seems to have been reached, though, except from "let us decide later".