Author:

• Name: Brent Burley
  Location: US - United States of America (United States)

To build:

    make

NOTE: We FORCE the use of -O0 even if someone overrides it because this entry will not work with it enabled.

To use:

    ./burley

NOTE: you need to input a number first. See judges’ remarks below for information on how to play.

Judges’ remarks:

This is a draw poker program. You start with $100. Input alternates between your bet and which cards to keep.

Example:

Here is an example.

First, enter your bet (say 5) (for $5, defaults to $1). You might then see something like:

J Q J 9 5
C H D S C

That indicates your hand is Jack of Clubs, Queen of Hearts, Jack of Diamonds, 9 of Spades and 5 of Clubs.

Now enter what cards you want to keep (enter 0 to 5 digits between 1 and 5). Let’s say you want to keep 1, 2 and 3 so you enter 123. You should see something like the following after you hit enter:

J Q J J Q
C H D S C

which tells you that your new hand is Jack of Clubs, Queen of Hearts, Jack of Diamonds, Jack of Spaces and Queen of clubs. You might now see something like:

$145 (45)

which tells you that your new balance is now $145. You had a Full House so your payoff is 9 times your bet == 45.

Payout:

The payout is according to “Vegas rules”:

• Straight Flush
  • 50 times your bet
• Four of a Kind
  • 25 times your bet
• Full House
  • 9 times your bet
• Flush
  • 6 times your bet
• Straight
  • 4 times your bet
• 3 of a Kind
  • 3 times your bet)
• 2 Pair
  • 2 times your bet
• Jacks or Better
  • 1 times your bet

Other things:

The program allows you to go into debt. However I’m sure you would never control-C to kill the program just because you got behind, right? On the other hand the program never willingly exits, so you have to leave even when you are ahead. :-)

Can you figure out a winning betting “strategy”? Then can you modify the program so this “strategy” no longer works?

Notice the clever use of setjmp(3) and longjmp(3) calls. Can you keep track of what state is being saved and restored?

NOTE: the author talks about how it is a single statement. This might not be strictly true in 2023 with the fixes for it to work so you can look at the original file burley.orig.c to see what is meant.

Author’s remarks:

This program plays draw poker. What is unusual about it is that it is written as a single statement – count the semicolons! (OK, there are really three statements if you count the variable declarations.) To keep things simple, I have avoided the C preprocessor and tricky statements such as if, for, do, while, switch, and goto.

Primary files

• burley.c - entry source code
• Makefile - entry Makefile
• burley.orig.c - original source code

Secondary files

• 2004_burley.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

Jump to: top