Recently Everybody Codes had a new competition. This time it involved a Turing machine like architecture and a new, related language, that everybody had to learn.

Thankfully I had discovered this “not in November” competition in time, so I was ready. Also, most days I was awake when the new quest appeared, and I actually got some respectable times.

The above graphic summarizes my results. Since I prepared it, I’ve remembered, that my quest 4, part 1, low golf program was very heavily inspired by a competitor. Still. I read the other program and then made my own along the same lines. Not quite stealing. I think.

It was actually a little hard to get a grip on how well I was doing. The tab “Your scores” showed some of the above, but I wanted to know more. I solved quest 1, part 1, using 481 rules. Is that good?

Also it wasn’t clear in the beginning which columns corresponded with championships. It turned out heads and states didn’t. Golf was added late, and it did. I wouldn’t say I wasted my time writing those 1 head and 2 state programs, but… I did okay on golf, without really trying, as my first program was always a shot at writing an understandable program, not optimizing for weird stuff. This turned out to create nice, short programs.

(I understand states didn’t produce any champion. I learned, that basically any program could be turned into a 2 states program by adding a head to keep track of the state. It makes sense to me, that wouldn’t be a championship. Still. I was no. 3 in that category overall.)

Yes, this is all very understandable, if you’ve been near this competition, and not, if not.

My plan is to blog about the different quests and parts and my own programs. Look forward to a lot of this:

All my code .