Landon Curt Noll
1b1dd2f2e4
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2.3 KiB
Best Layout:
Heather Downs, Selene Makarios
The Software Bungalow
900 High School Way, #2202
Mountain View, CA 94041
USA
To build:
make all
To run:
./heathbar num num
where num is a non-negative number.
Try:
./heathbar 4253 2281
Judges' comments:
The main reason we liked this entry was mainly because the main effect of the source was self documenting! :-)
Author's comments
Run this program with two non-negative integer arguments (e.g. "prog 1234 999").
My goal was to create the fastest possible C program. To that end, I made three critical observations:
- If there's one thing computers are good at, it's math.
- Simple operations take less time than complicated ones.
- Every C program seems to contain the word "main".
Based on #1, I knew that the Fastest Program had to be one that performed addition. From #2, I reasoned that it ought to directly manipulate the bits, rather than wasting time dealing with bloated, high-level, fuzzy-logic, artificial-intelligence, neural-net, client-server, object-oriented abstractions like the C language "+" operator. And it was obvious from #3 that the program should resemble, as closely as possible, a long sequence of the familiar word "main" repeated over and over, so the computer would be comfortable running the program and wouldn't get distracted dealing with unfamiliar variable names.
Also, I've looked at some past winning entries of your contest, and if you don't mind a little constructive criticism, some of them are kind-of hard to figure out. I didn't want my program to fall into the same trap, so I went out of my way to write self-documenting code. Anyone who so much as glances at my program will immediately see that it adds two 16-bit unsigned integers by streaming their bits through a simulated cascade of hardware adders. I hope my diligent effort to write especially clear code gets me extra points!
P.S. What does "obfuscated" mean?
Copyright and CC BY-SA 4.0 License:
This file is Copyright (c) 2023 by Landon Curt Noll. All Rights Reserved. You are free to share and adapt this file under the terms this license:
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
For more information, see: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/