Programming challenge

[Zach Wegner]

Looking through the archives, I found this old thread:
http://www.stmintz.com/ccc/index.php?id=413274

I thought it might be nice to have some more of these little contests in this group, since it seems rather slow lately.

So here's some proposed rules:
One week for contest entries.
All programs must be in ANSI C.
I don't know how to judge-maybe there should be different categories like smallest source code, most readable, etc. I think smallest source code would be most interesting (and least subjective).

And here's a proposed first contest:
Write the smallest program to *calculate* perft 6 from the starting position.

Comments welcome. Entries valid for exactly one week, e.g. before Nov. 9 at 7:24 my time.

[mageofmaple]

A lot of people already have appropriate code for this, or could get very close from open-source material. How about a perft 6 for the 10x8 Capablanca's Chess array? That would require some more ingenituity. Additionally, the results would be more useful, as it would explore an area that hasn't been throughly researched already ...
If the idea is accepted, though, I would suggest fastest ANSI C code, and a somewhat longer time limit.

[YL84]

hi,
nice idea, but if you restrict it to C language I could not participate
yves

[hgm]

And here's a proposed first contest:
Write the smallest program to *calculate* perft 6 from the starting position.

Can micro-Max participate?

[friedeks]

So here's some proposed rules:
One week for contest entries.
All programs must be in ANSI C.

I would suggest not to restrict the programming language.
Would be much more interesting...

[smrf]

Challenges, which demand to publish serious parts of ones own work, are not interesting for me, sorry.

Reinhard.

[Zach Wegner]

A lot of people already have appropriate code for this, or could get very close from open-source material.

That's the reason the challenge is smallest code. Micro-max could be used, but it is already much too big. I think you could get this down to maybe 5-10 lines...

But you do bring up one important point: the work must be original, i.e. not copied from open source (unless you wrote the open source).

As to others' concern about the language: I'm not really sure what to do. Having code in different languages would greatly complicate the judging. We could of course add C++, but anything else would require us to throw out the smallest code rule, I think.

The fastest code rule is not interesting to me, at least for this challenge. That is because so many people already have highly optimized move generators.

[jshriver]

And here's a proposed first contest:
Write the smallest program to *calculate* perft 6 from the starting position.

Can micro-Max participate?

lol if so you win

[jshriver]

I must have been away when this thread came about, but I really really like the idea.

Sometimes it's nice to break out of your normal routines and play a game, and writing a small program to do a modest task is fun.

Hope to see more like this,
Josh

[jshriver]

Is the thread mentioned accessible from CCC or is it from the days prior to phpBB2?

Anyway I tried the forth language example and received this error:

jshriver@DolphinBoy:~$ gforth knights.f

in file included from *the terminal*:0
knights.f:23: Undefined word
including color to move
^^^^^^^^^
Backtrace:
$B7998DC4 throw
$B79A47E8 no.extensions

Any tips?