• Name: Heather Downs
  Location: US - United States of America (United States)
  
  
• Name: Selene Makarios
  Location: US - United States of America (United States)

To build:

    make all

To use:

    ./heathbar num num

where num is a non-negative number.

Try:

    ./try.sh

Judges’ remarks:

The main reason we liked this entry was mainly because the main effect of the source was self documenting! :-)

Author’s remarks:

Run this program with two non-negative integer arguments (e.g. ./heathbar 1234 999).

My goal was to create the fastest possible C program. To that end, I made three critical observations:

1. If there’s one thing computers are good at, it’s math.
2. Simple operations take less time than complicated ones.
3. 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?

Primary files

• heathbar.c - entry source code
• Makefile - entry Makefile
• heathbar.orig.c - original source code
• try.sh - script to try entry

Secondary files

• 1995_heathbar.tar.bz2 - download entry tarball
• README.md - markdown source for this web page
• .entry.json - entry summary and manifest in JSON
• .gitignore - list of files that should not be committed under git
• .path - directory path from top level directory
• index.html - this web page

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