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WORDSEARCH Consolation Awards
As always ... there are consolation awards. Some folks actually
try and win these things - perhaps YOU will find your entry wins
one of these in the next POTM!
The coveted "Best Name Award" goes to "bon_mot" from John Linderman
The following is from John's write-up ... I guess he did a
good job convincing me that he should get this award!
I confess great glee at my entry name, "bon_mot".
The dictionary definition is "a clever saying", satisfying
the universal smart-ass urge to take Fred literally when he
specifies "something clever, please", for entry names.
But the underlying etymology is "good word", which is a
pretty respectable description of my algorithm, trying to
select a "good word" from the choices at each point of
conflict. Doesn't take much to make ME gleeful.
Consolation consolation prize for best name: Raghotham Murthy (DRAW_HER_COS)
Raghotham writes:
Guess why my entry was called "DRAW HER COS"?!!
Well, it is an anagram of "WORD SEARCH"!!! Good eh?!!
In a word ... no.
I'd prefer "Word Chaser" or "Shared Crow" or "Harder Cows"
By the way, your name anagrams to "A tough rhythm ram"
Consolation consolation consolation prize to "Consolation_Prize" from
William Little.
Nice try ... but this is the best award you're gonna get.
Maybe if you'd have tried it in French???
Most Cryptic Program name to Alexandr Ermolaev for "Box_With_Mouthfuls"
Ummmm .... huh?
The best non-C/C++ entry was Eccl_6_11 from Phil Sallee (PERL)
Proving once again that compiled languages and speedy run-time
aren't always necessary to do well in the POTM ...
Best bang-for-the-buck award to word_finder_general from Joachim Smith
Joachim managed to finish in 7th place while using only
0.03% of the available time. Perhaps if I'd run this
entry 3300 times it would have found a better solution!
Honorable mention to SuperCyborg from Navin Pai and
wordmine from V. Raghavan.
Best Brother Act to Jaco and Henco Cronje ...
Jaco's Genetic_grouper won and Henco's Wordofobia did not
successfully complete the problem - but between them they
have the best pair of entries I've ever had from brothers.
Henco writes of his brother's advice that he might have
done better if he had looked for random words for 10 minutes.
Well ... the brothers are forming a software company ... I
wonder who will be the CEO???
Best comments I noticed inside an entry to Morgan David for Seattle_Slew
Hehe ... I just LOVE doing this part ... excerpts follow
(Seattle_Slew timed out after ten minutes with no output):
* Commentary: There is little doubt in my mind that the
top ten finishers will find the best solution
in terms of word and letter count. The challenge
here will be "Who can come in the fastest."
* Thank you Fred for giving me a totally fun weekend and
reminding me of the true love of programming I once had.
* I will be surprised if someone can get it faster.
Worst Fall from grace to Tim Brierley for We_Be_Searchin
Tim sat atop the system test results list for 12 weeks scaring
people with a great score and a miniscule run time. Along
the way there was some good-natured exchange via the message
board (some of us have socks older than Tim). Unfortunately,
We_Be_Searchin stopped searchin' before it found a final solution.
Best "If I had it to do over" answer comes from Mike Rios (LetterRip)
Mike suggested that perhaps his focus was not quite targetted
correctly since his goal for his next POTM will be:
"Coming up with a cool name *and* a method of solving the puzzle"
Best reason for entering goes to Alice McRae for word_winds
Alice teaches at Appalachian State University here in
the USofA and apparently mentioned her intent to compete
in the POTM to her class. Of course, mentioning something
like that makes it very difficult to "change your mind"
so I wanted to make sure that she had at least a consolation
award to brag about. Perhaps some of her class can participate
in the next POTM!
Best innermost secret to Tim Brierley (We_Be_Searchin):
"My innermost secret would be that I eat cows..."
(well ... it struck me as worthy of some sort of award
at the time, although in retrospect I have no idea what
it means or why I thought it should get an award)
Best testing strategy to Colin Rafferty for word2k
I'm hoping this isn't a trend, but Colin writes:
"My testing strategy was to keep submitting it to Fred,
and have Fred tell me what was wrong."
Most words found is 335 by Jeffrey Rainy's "The_Sword"
But The_Sword finished about 30th in the number of letters!
Honorable mention to The_Sword for having the largest
executable program (1.2Meg) of the batch!
Least words found was 2 by Koder Wannabe's snakepit
Hey, at least I (I mean he) generated a solution!
Longest run goes to Emil Ong's Python entry "Finn"
Finn ran for 96,940 seconds before I noticed it and killed it.
As such, it became the first POTM entry to run longer
than an entire day. It still hadn't finished! One day
I'll have to fix my "killer" to work with Python programs.
The "Made me Crazy" award to Marcin Mika for Twisted_SeArChOr
The following is an excerpt from some interim mail to Marcin:
Well ... I received your latest update, changed all the =3D to =,
rejoined the split lines, removed all the =20's and =09's and finally
got it to compile. It promptly sucked up all available memory
and swap space and effectively shut down the machine again.
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