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It is easy to compete in the POTM, it is much harder
to achieve the ultimate goal:
The POTM Consolation Awards!
The coveted BEST NAME award - an award envied by all and worthy of bragging rights for all time goes to ... (drum roll)
Nobody. I feel it necessary to hold back this coveted award for XWORDS.
Perhaps it is my fault - the goal should be made clearer!
With entry names like "1x", and "X2", and "4th_Version" finishing in
the top 20 it is obvious that most of you spent too much time on the
actual programming and have forgotten the real POTM competition:
to come up with a program name that is worthy of recognition.
That said ... I will invent some "new" program name awards.
Most Cryptic Program Name
Goes to mongbei for airacuara ... which is Araucaria backwards ... which
means "Monkey Puzzle" which is the name of a tree. AND, the pseudonym
of a renowned crossword puzzle creator. Check the link:
http://www.crossword.org.uk/arauc.htm.
All of which, on reflection, causes me to re-instate the BEST NAME award:
The coveted BEST NAME award - an award envied by all and worthy of bragging rights for all time goes to ... (another drum roll)
mongbei for "airacuara" ... for all the reasons stated above!
Program name with the best/worst Pun
Goes to mmammel for "gibes" ... which he explains are "cross words"
Best non-C entry
Was mjs for WordCracker1_31 in python ... honorable mention to
MCross from Magus for his perl entry.
Skinniest entry that actually did something
goes to mjs for WordCracker1_31 ... Mike set his goals a bit differently
from the top finishers, but still managed an 11th place finish with
a 96 line commented python program.
Check out his source code here.
Best Use Of the Flipper Square
The participants (for the most part) didn't make much use of the
flipper square - those that did generally tried to fit a word or
two in at the end using the flipper. Whether or not michael's use
of the flipper square is the difference that enabled WordOMatic to
win so decisively will be discussed for years, but I just think this
excerpt from his solution to DECLARATION deserves presentation:
Best AWK entry
Why am I the only one that sees the beauty of awk?
Nonetheless - it appears to be a surefire way to win an award for myself.
The Procrastination Award
to DanHostetler for TripleWordScore - submitted on February 28th at
23:56 - four minutes before the deadline. Even more surprising is that
TripleWordScore didn't make an appearance until 9:00 on the evening
of the 28th. Still more surprise: TripleWordScore finished in third place.
Best Scammer Award
goes to GlopGlop. Early versions of his entry were canned solutions - a
completely legitimate subterfuge frequently employed by participants
to achieve high placement on the system test lists.
The wrinkle is that GlopGlop inserted a no-op loop
(to accumulate processing time) in his code so it
wasn't obvious that the solution was pre-computed. All is forgiven
though, since an actual running entry was eventually submitted and
achieved a respectable 26th place finish even with a timeout on OLOGIES.
I view the timeout as quite apropos.
Best Reason for Competing
Goes to DanHostetler ... who wrote:
"Ultimate frisbee is my current obsession. Fortunately, I was injured
for long enough to complete the contest."
The "we all understand" award
goes to mongbei in Shanghai who lists what he does for fun:
"Programming, learning philosophy, learning Chinese for fun.
I have a family who have different ideas of fun!"
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