Result for Hard Contest

congratulations, prelude! great job. your entry was 100 times better than all the other contestants' combined. can anyone guess why?

because there were no other contestants. oh well. better luck next time.

i won't bother going through the categories. i found nothing wrong with the entry when i compiled it, except for a type-casting error which could have been avoided if i compiled it in c. one of the fractal patterns generated didn't scale upwards like the others did, but since that was not a requirement anyway, no harm done. all were executed within one second (on my machine, anyway). to see the fractals generated as png files, i've attached the file. (i did attach this file before, so don't bother downloading it if you've already seen it)

and next, her code:

instead of posting the whole thing, i'll just upload her zip as an attachment

here's my code for showing the fractal, if anyone's interested.

wtg prelude! I would like to see the code for that. I would've entered the contest but didn't know anything about fractals :(
I was hoping for the LISP contest.

the code is attached as the second zip i posted

Kinda sux that all these people voting for these contests and only one person actually does it. Wonder if there's a better way of doing these polls?

Great Job Prelude. Very nice.

Well then why are people polling like this...... I think Instead of a poll the webmaster himself should decide a common contest....

the webmaster isn't at all involved in this. i assume you meant me. :D

in any case, last time people voted for something unpopular was the small RPG idea in the easy contest. i changed it to the next most popular idea, which got two contestants. the most popular contest so far has been the encryption contest.

one of the reasons i'm automating the process (see the contest design thread for details) is to make each contest expected. the next contest poll is on sunday, and it should start from monday until next monday (one week exactly). then there's the next week to judge, decide, and start the next contest. 2 weeks is a long time, but it's better than what was happening before (which is partly my fault).

the reason why i'm not simply deciding the contest myself is because it wouldn't be fun. the people should decide the contest they want. it also (ideally) better reflects what the coders out there are capable of. if i chose a hard contest, and only 2 or 3 people were capable of that, it wouldn't be fair to the others.

hey Prelude, why all the comments?:p

Great prog!

>hey Prelude, why all the comments?
You say that like it's a bad thing?!

Comments, when used correctly, are v good. Understanding the syntax of C is dead easy, there's like a million tutorials on how to do that. Understanding the methodology someone has used to implement a program is much harder, and quite often there are no tutorials, as the code is often unique in it's own way.

>hey Prelude, why all the comments?
Everyone programs differently, the goal of comments is not to describe what the code does as anyone can learn the syntax of a language. The goal of commenting is to pass the intention of the programmer to the reader. Why did you do this? Why this data structure instead of this one? What's the purpose of this block of code? Why did you go with the simpler/harder/more obfuscated solution instead of so and so? Comments solve the problem of why, not how.

But I actually didn't use many comments at all, most of the commenting was documenting functions and the rest were used to clarify problematic or hard to understand blocks of code.

-Prelude