Rename hint.txt and hint.text to README.md

2006/sloane/README.md

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+# Homer's Favorite
+
+Andy Sloane
+1041 Seneca St.
+Hartford, WI 53027
+US
+
+## Judges' Comments:
+
+### To build:
+
+        make slone
+
+### To run:
+
+        ./sloane
+
+Looks almost good enough to eat, dunnit?  I suppose you could argue that,
+at first blush, this looks like a self-reproducing program.
+
+## Selected Author's Comments:
+
+This program doesn't require any special build options, other than that it
+uses sin and cos and hence requires the math library.
+
+You will almost certainly get a compiler warning because I declared a bunch
+of global ints without types.  The code looks better this way, though, I
+think.  There are also no #includes, so there may be warnings for
+undeclared references to printf, etc.  There's a chance that my failure to
+include math.h or declare sin or cos will make the donut not render
+properly -- it's worked on every system I've tried so far though.
+
+You will need some kind of VT100-ish emulation; so while this compiles and
+runs OK in Windows, you will need PuTTYcyg or something like that.
+
+The shape of the source gives a hint about its output: it's a little
+animation of a shaded donut rotating over an infinite checkerboard.  Like
+many IOCCC entries, it is thus self-documenting.
+
+I wanted to create something as "pure" as I could - meaning that the
+entire source code is shaped into a work of art, without being prefixed
+by any #define hacks, or even #includes, _and_ is portable enough to not
+require any special libraries to do the animating.  I achieved this with
+two standard escape codes for clearing the screen and moving the cursor
+back to the top-left.
+
+The donut isn't raytraced.  It's much simpler than that.
+
+### How is it obfuscated?
+
+There are three main pieces to this program: the donut, the checkerboard,
+and the ASCII logo.  The first two are programmed in a straightforward way
+(with z-buffering even!), but the mathematics for drawing them is
+"optimized".  The ASCII logo has been shrunk into the smallest I could make
+it by any means necessary.
+
+The logo can actually be compressed much better (ironically, by doing
+something simpler), but I didn't discover this until well after submitting.
+
+### Puzzles
+
+In increasing order of difficulty:
+
+ - Can you change the shading of the donut and checkerboard?
+
+ - Can you change the movement rates of the donut, the checkerboard, and
+   the scrolling logo?
+
+ - Can you change the inner/outer radii of the donut?  The height/scaling
+   of the checkerboard?
+
+ - How is the "IOCCC 2006" logo encoded?  Can you put something else in its
+   place?  Can you find a smaller encoding?
+