We have a winner ... we have a winner!!!! * * THE PRIMETIME WINNER IS: * * * A L L A N W I L K S * * * * ( for "primeval" ) * The POTM trophy will be shipped to Murray Hill to be proudly displayed as Allan serves his reign as POTM champion. Jim Roche, former POTM winner, is the winner of the Tournament of Champions with "wookin_po_nubbas" ========================================================================= The top finishers follow. Note that only about a third of the entries actually found the best solutions for all five final squares. These are the entries that found the best solutions to the final squares. Details on the scoring and timing will be sent under separate cover to those who participated by sending in entries, as will the detailed information on ALL the entries! PLACE TIME(ms) PROGRAM PARTICIPANT EMAIL 1 410 primeval Allan Wilks allan@research.att.com 2 540 fermata Doug McIlroy doug@research.att.com 3 940 vprime Phong Vo kpv@research.att.com 4 1080 ptime Bob Ashenfelter ash@hotlg.att.com 5 1400 primary Warren Montgomery warren@iwrmv1.ih.att.com 6 1700 primal_duck Mike Gagle bl_indpls!gagle@inuxs.att.com 7 3700 primer Donald Knudsen dbk@sirius.att.com 8 7320 goldbach Dave Lynch dfl@esun.att.com 9 7400 primoggle Ravi Sharma sharma@mozart.att.com 10 15730 potm_prime Samir Gulve gulve@ctc.ih.att.com 11 31260 gridzip Rana Dutt rcd@mtqua.mt.att.com 12 59590 EnQuest Frank Rehwinkel fsr@kingfish.att.com 13 70300 goodprimes David Good dgood@iwcs.att.com 14 366240 FIVE Mark Meyer mdm@cbnscs.att.com 15 525040 Deion Dennis Sanger drs@dr.att.com ============= and the TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONS: ================= 1 430 wookin_po_nubbas =Jim Roche roche@ccr-p.ida.org 2 660 primanujan =Vincent Goffin vjg@mozart.att.com ========================================================================= It appears as though the problem had four major parts .... 1) reading in the square 2) extracting numbers from the square 3) testing these numbers for primality 4) once you get it working, test it to make sure it works on even the strangest of squares The faster entries tended towards read() or getc() as opposed to scanf ... I suspect that this didn't make a whole lot of relative difference though. The fastest programs seemed to really optimize the extraction problem through the use of bitmapping and tables to enable numbers to be quickly extracted numbers from the square. The very fastest did some testing during the extraction to avoid extracting easily-testable composites. The prime testing didn't seem to be particularly difficult for most folks. Separate mail discussed a few math goodies that may have speeded things up a bit, but the time spent in doing prime testing seemed small compared to the time spent doing extraction for most entries! All-in-all, more than 2/3 the entries failed to find all five "best" solutions to the final squares ... I was very happy about this (since I wasn't real sure the problem was tough enough). But I suspect some participants may not be as thrilled. In short: be careful that shortcuts are applied correctly and TEST, TEST, TEST!!!! You'll be receiving mail over the next few days as the program write-ups roll in. The details on the scoring are in a separate mail for those who submitted entries. Everything should be cleaned up by the end of the week! Anyhow, thanks to everyone for participating ... hope to see you for the NEXT challenge .... =Fred Hicinbothem .... POTM-master! fah@potm.att.com