hacker.org

finally a challenge to relax,

why writing any code at all? - just use the windows (or pocket or xxx) calculator ...

as usual I tried not to use any special software, only Delphi ... Rotating with a best fractional fit i.e. the value of each pixel & each color in target (integer) is the weighted average of the four pixels (integer) around the calculated source point (double). Looking for the best linear alignm...

First I separated the MP4 with avisynth into about 360 000 single jpgs -- that took a while. But I was quite astonished to see how badly Windows 2008 is performing if you have 100 000 or more files in one directory -- so never do it. With 50 000 files per directory everything is fine, maybe the limi...

@gfoot yes indeed, running the assembler part in Delphi on an old P4 you only need 11 secs -- so it is not really efficient to recalculate backwards (although that looks quite easy too, but surely will take more than 11 s). This challenge was a kind of recreation - after a lot of really hard challen...

@Belriel just use www.google.com/ncr and you get no country redirection

whoever uses J# from Microsoft (I do it for laziness with VS 2005 ...)

-- oh dear, he/she will get a completely different solution.

there is obviously no common RNG ...

it wouldn't be bad to post at least the cycles for those programs, that manage this test map. My behemoth program with 480 ops needs 14855 cycles for the warm up map which was apparently good enought for this job -- but it needs over 22700 for a complete empty map (this could be further improved).

with a little bit knowledge of "sectio aurea" you don't need any coding at all, just the Windows calculator and you'll find the solution manually in only some seconds ...

just programming it straight bit for bit with no tricks at all you get 54 instructions which is 29 instructions shorter than Lukas's code and easier to understand, but that's really nothing to get excited about -- a bit different to the tricky program for the smallest mouse with only 21 instructions...

ok,ok I confess: my small mouse was cheating -- but only a little bit. It mostly finds the right solution and needs only 22 opcodes.

And cheating is a good qualification for hackers, isn't it?