Just as a quick bit of context here, Konrad Hinsen has a specific agenda that he is trying to push with this challenge. It's not clear from this summary article, but if you look at the original abstract soliciting entries for the challenge (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03296-8), it's a bit clearer that Hinsen is using this to challenge the technical merits of Common Workflow Language (https://www.commonwl.org/; currently used in bioinformatics by the Broad Institute via the Cromwell workflow manager).
Hinsen has created his own DSL, Leibniz (https://github.com/khinsen/leibniz ; http://dirac.cnrs-orleans.fr/~hinsen/leibniz-20161124.pdf), which he believes is a better alternative to Common Workflow Language. This reproducibility challenge is in support of this agenda in particular, which is worth keeping in mind; it is not an unbiased thought experiment.