Today is the last day for PRIMETIME (aside from requests for files containing details). Thank you all for participating ... the attached is the standard consolation prize mail ... time now to take a few weeks off for real work .... =Fred BEST PROGRAM NAME: squambulator from Lew Mammel. Anything that didn't begin with "pri" was a finalist in this one, I liked the picture of "ambulating" about the square. BEST ATTEMPT TO WIN BEST PROGRAM NAME: FIVE by Mark Meyer. Mark included a dozen or so lines in his program explaining why "FIVE" was a great name, not the least of which was: " when each character in FIVE is converted to its ASCII decimal value (70, 73, 86, 69) and then concatenated produces the result 70738669 which is (you guessed it!) a prime number" (This probably explains his use of upper case letters.) THE LONG DISTANCE AWARD: priem by Stan Peijffers. Who competed from AT&T-NS-NL in Hilversum, Netherlands. THE LONGER THE BETTER AWARD: primeval.c by Allan Wilks. 118,038 characters ... most of it in giant tables to help extract numbers from the square ... and alot in comments that I asked Allan to add! THE "BUY A NEW DISK" AWARD: priem by Stan Peijffers. The executable turned out to be 23,143,564 bytes long. A new rule was immediately created. THE CARNAGIE MELLON AWARD: prime8 from Stephan Zdancewic. This POTM was an option for a class at CMU ... there were four entries from the CMU folks, prime8 did the best by solving 4 of the 5 correctly and (incidentally) having the best time. Hope I'll see more non-AT&T participation!!! THE "LIFE IN THE FAST LANE" AWARD: pringle from Palith Balakrishnabati This entry was the fastest of the bunch ... but pringle couldn't solve HOT DOG. Perhaps one short-cut too many ??? QUOTABLE QUOTE: from Landon Curt Noll (author of factor.c, whom I was unable to contact ... the quote is from his .sig methinks) MOST HONEST COMPETITOR: Fred Hicinbothem Fred stopped competing to start preparing the finals, and then received a square his entry couldn't solve . Out of a sense of honesty (or was it laziness?) Fred did not go back and try and reprogram his entry. (hey - I gotta win SOMETHING!) THE LONGEST TIME THINKING AWARD: EnQuest from Frank Rehwinkel. Frank's entry arrived on October 26th. I didn't hear from him again until midnight on the 15th! ====================== Late breaking stuff =========================== HOT DOG What's the reason for so many entries finding the "44404447" prime rather than the bigger "74447447" 7 4 7 4 7 prime? Well, those programs that treated ZERO as 4 4 4 4 4 just another digit even in the lead position may 7 4 4 4 4 have run into trouble. Reason: they will find 4 4 4 4 4 the solution "044404447" during their 9-digit search. 7 4 4 4 0 They will NEVER find "074447447" since this value (with a leading zero) cannot be extracted from the square. If (having found a nine digit solution) they do NOT return to look for eight digit solutions, they'll never find the 74447447 solution. This was a completely accidental artifact of HOT DOG, the only goal of which was to come up with an eight digit solution in a non-(7,4,1) square.