VCCC2023: Christmas Challenge

[jgharston]

I only just remembered a couple of hours ago to submit an entry. A few minutes before sending it I realised I'd included a screenshot of an earlier version! Blegh! Had to re-run everything and re-do the screenshots.

I didn't go for a minimalist entry - couldn't seem to get my brain into gear - so went for a wildcard pretty extras version.

[jgharston]

Ah crap. I've now just thought of an optimisation to remove an IF clause.

Edit: Yep. Saves 12 bytes.

[Diminished]

Well, that's both my entries (sizecoding + wild) sent in, and I'm not happy with either of them.

[atsampson]

I've submitted a couple as well. I don't expect either to be competitive in terms of size, but both are for platforms that nobody submitted last year...

Edit: ... and a third platform just before the deadline, having had an idea over lunch!

[Diminished]

Well, that's both my entries (sizecoding + wild) sent in, and I'm not happy with either of them.

Logiker graciously gave me an extension to submit my Wild entry, so I'm spending Christmas shouting at Beebasm

[julie_m]

Well, now the deadline for entering is past, am I OK to say that if you wrote the size of the lookup table I ended up using as a decimal number and doubled it, then read it as a hex number, that was the size of my first effort that I still managed to round down to end with a 0 in one of those bases?

[Diminished]

Personally I'd prefer it if people waited for Logiker's video in a few days, but last year people started posting their results as soon as the deadline expired (against my protest). So I think I'm going to check out of this thread now.

See you in January.

[dp11]

Would a compromise be the following : Newer people to this games might feel its hard to participate and talk about their entries / ideas because very quickly the code size reduces. So I suggest entries /ideas above 250bytes can can talked about on the 26th, above 200bytes on the 27th and above 150 bytes on the 28th until the results are announced .

[fuzzel]

Hmm, not many takers so far for the greater than 250 bytes solutions. Maybe everyone's done very well this year. If, like me, you've ran out of steam and would like another programming challenge or two to keep you going for a few days, how about the two competition puzzles below, taken from the December 1983 and January 1984 issues of Acorn User respectively? The first one was relatively straightforward for me but the second one is proving a real headscratcher. Multiple simultaneous equations with an eye-watering number of variables. Ouch! Maybe this is more suited to the maths lovers than the programmers or maybe there's a simpler solution aside from brute force algorithms...
[attachment=1]Acorn User Competition Jan84.png[/attachment]
[attachment=0]Acorn User Competition Dec83.png[/attachment]

[tnash]

I could do it by hand I think but not without bringing back horrendous memories of 1st year at Uni

[elkrepair]

Would a compromise be the following : Newer people to this games might feel its hard to participate and talk about their entries / ideas because very quickly the code size reduces. So I suggest entries /ideas above 250bytes can can talked about on the 26th, above 200bytes on the 27th and above 150 bytes on the 28th until the results are announced .

Sounds like a very good idea.

[tnash]

How are we counting size for BASIC? Just TOP–PAGE?

[dp11]

How are we counting size for BASIC? Just TOP–PAGE?

First post says TOP-PAGE

[tnash]

Haha oh dear how did I miss that

[JohnH]

I can't wait to be baffled by how small and cunning and weird some of the entries are, I could barely understand some of last years best entries. Fingers crossed that I'm less than double some of the smallest

[dp11]

Results to be announced Saturday 6pm GMT

[Phil_G]

My entry was in assembler on the National SC/MP
https://www.mccrash-racing.co.uk/philg/ ... m#xmas2023

[jgharston]

I got my pure BBC BASIC, absolutely no bells and whistles vers down to 107 bytes. I'm sure with some extra thought I could have squeezed a bit more, but I've been doing a load of ZX Spectrum coding* over the last week or so.

*Actually, extracting Spectrum Z80 code from lots of projects and tidying them into stand-alone libraries that can be used in other code. I made the mistake of thinking it would be a good idea to optimise the code, and ended up killing some of it. I'd clearly already optimised the code when I originally wrote it.

[elkrepair]

If anyone is interested, the data for the second challenge in fuzzel's post above is:

Code: Select all

  100DATA 10,3,2,3,18,15,13,7,15,11,15,7,9,9,23,4688
  110DATA 14,24,20,25,23,24,7,1,10,15,9,4,11,13,11,4828
  120DATA 9,0,25,3,7,14,5,17,1,13,7,15,4,18,20,4861
  130DATA 22,23,12,3,25,19,13,24,14,10,13,20,24,16,10,7097
  140DATA 24,8,18,17,22,24,18,25,5,11,18,25,22,21,10,7649
  150DATA 15,14,5,20,1,11,7,10,22,24,15,7,8,2,11,4191
  160DATA 25,1,22,17,23,23,18,4,17,21,20,2,6,17,22,5970
  170DATA 20,17,10,22,16,12,4,11,10,6,8,3,17,13,22,5275
  180DATA 4,14,12,23,8,18,20,17,1,15,14,15,2,22,15,5322
  190DATA 14,23,6,6,16,19,8,20,23,20,2,18,12,14,25,6172
  200DATA 24,2,15,1,13,9,10,17,5,0,14,24,16,18,3,5278
  210DATA 25,15,15,15,23,14,18,7,15,13,2,1,0,1,18,3395
  220DATA 7,18,10,24,24,15,11,24,5,19,0,22,18,23,8,6133
  230DATA 18,2,17,0,19,13,13,23,3,16,14,15,21,20,24,7147
  240DATA 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,411

[julie_m]

Is everyone ready to watch the results, then? I haven't felt this excited for about 7 months .....

Here's the annotated version of my entry: https://github.com/JulieMontoya/Random_Beeb_Stuff/tree/main/xmas_comp_2023

[fuzzel]

Looks like I'm first whilst everyone else is watching the results. This is basically a 3 by 3 grid of diamonds so I set up two For / Next loops to draw 9 diamonds from the centre of each. I noticed that each diamond can be drawn from x coordinates of -3 to +3 from the centre of the diamond and that the two y coordinates for each x coordinate could be calculated as +/- (3 minus the absolute value of the x value).
74 bytes in total.
At a later date I may have a go at an assembly language version although having already thought about it I doubt the code would be smaller.

Code: Select all

5FORA=4TO16STEP6:FORB=4TO16STEP6:FORC=-3TO3:D=3-ABS(C):PRINTTAB(A+C,B+D)"*"TAB(A+C,B-D)"*":NEXT:NEXT:NEXT

[elkrepair]

I did it in two lines of BBC Basic, no DATA, in 75 bytes:

Code: Select all

1D=1:FORT=3TO15STEP6:FORS=1TO2:X=T:FORY=1TO19:PRINTTAB(X,Y)"*":IFX=0ORX=18D=-D
2X=X+D:NEXT,,

Clear the screen then run.

Didn't submit though.

[BigEd]

You can save two bytes, @fuzzel, by using "NEXT,," instead of "NEXT:NEXT:NEXT". Nice approach, though! Simple and direct.

[tnash]

133 bytes but it is pretty and twinkly particularly if sped up a bit with a copro.

Code: Select all

1MODE2:VDU23;8202;0;0;0;:X=3:U=1:V=1
2X=X+U:Y=Y+V:VDU17,RND(7),31,X,Y,42:IFX MOD3>0GOTO2ELSEIFX MOD18=0U=-U
3IFY MOD18=0V=-V ELSEV=2*RND(2)-3
4GOTO2

[dp11]

My 51 byte basic solution with only one variable https://bbcmic.ro/#%7B%22v%22%3A1%2C%22 ... %5Cn%22%7D

[Rich Talbot-Watkins]

I did it in one line of BASIC:

Owlet link (50 bytes)

and later realised I could save another byte by splitting it over two lines and making it a bit more ugly:

Owlet link (49 bytes)

I could probably explain the incremental process that led to that solution in case anyone were interested!

[julie_m]

I'm just amazed by how small the BASIC entries got!

[Diminished]

Well, my animated wild entry wasn't even shown moving in the results video, which I thought was miserable.

I won't be participating next year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=komh0jJgaP4

[BeebMaster]

No idea if mine was in there. Here it is anyway.

Code: Select all

10FORC=3TO15STEP6:FORA=9TO21STEP6:FORB=-3TO3:PRINTTAB(A+ABSB,C+B)"*"TAB(A+6-ABSB,C-B)"*":NEXT,,

[flaxcottage]

I did it in one line of BASIC:

Owlet link (50 bytes)

Respect!