Wellll ... for those folks not fortunate enough to WIN, there are always the coveted consolation awards ... so, without further adieu: THE BEST ENTRY NAME: "O+PTM_rtll" from Keith Vollherbst Keith's entry finished near the top, and his program name garnered him this award ... if you didn't try and write a program, it may not be obvious. The "rtll" part is right-transport-left-left and when you apply that to the five tiles "O+PTM" where "+" is the empty spot you get .... THE BEST BANG-FOR-THE-BUCK was "tilex" from Joe Eccles Five perfect scores in 370 milliseconds TOTAL! So what if there were a lot of moves in the solutons .... Joe can solve 7900 squares while Stan's winning entry was solving five! Warren Montgomery's "twobits" was a close runner-up! THE BETTER LATE THAN NEVER AWARD goes to "ramduf" from Randy Saint The first I heard from Randy was 24 hours before the deadline. Luckily, all compiled and ran well. Thanks to Randy for staying up late to complete his entry! THE LAST MINUTE CHANGE AWARD is for "dubious" from Mark Studebaker Just one last change caused "dubious" to arrive at the potm doorstep at 3:00 AM on May 1 ... shortly after I had sent out the mail announcing the winner!!! (I did include the NEW "dubious" numbers in the details distribution ... but it is dubious whether "dubious" could have won with this new entry) THE AT LEAST I TRIED AWARD to everyone. Apparently, this was the most difficult problem to date ... judging from the number of entries. If you gave it a shot, but didn't have the time to complete an entry - I hope the fun was worth it. Maybe you'll find the NEXT one a bit easier. If you ARE one of the folks who sent entries - THANKS!!! =Fred