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Wednesday, October 09, 2002

Better Than I Thought

So, it turns out mine was the very first actual submission to the international functional programming contest, or perhaps the first that worked, since even though they called mine number 4 there were no 1, 2 or 3 in the lightening category results.

Given that, not too bad then that I ranked third place (of eight). The stupid bug I found too late ended up only costing me 220 points (the three rounds where mine never finished), so even if I hadn't had that bug, I still would have been in third place. The only notable difference would be that my bot's Time would have been around 3 seconds -- by far the fastest of the lot -- since most of the 30 seconds mine took were in the three rounds where it fell into a trivial infinite loop.

For the general category, I put another couple hours into it, and once again submitted the first entry, number 16 (the first of the non-lightening category) out of nearly 300. And coincidentally, I placed 16th. Not bad for the first-submitted entry of ~300, eh!? And here my bug may have hurt me more than in the lightening category -- only about 120 points max, but that would have put me in around 5th place by the looks of it.

So, alas, even without the stupid bug I wouldn't have won in either category, but I think I met my goal of submitting a respectable entry in twelve hours or less. :)

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In other news...

I went to the bank today to get a rather large cashier's check made out (on a friend's behalf) to some woman he is buying a car from. When I asked the teller what the fee would be, she said "normally it would be $6, but I'm going to wave the fee just this once..." "Oh? Uh, thank you..." When she gave me the check she said "you keep this part, and give her that part... lucky girl." Oh dear.

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