Repeat Champions!

Good July afternoon everyone!

This will be a bland first post for the 2014 Ginter Code solution blog, but ... everything has to start somewhere. Maybe.

The 2014 Allen & Ginter Code was, in a word, grueling.  In my humble opinion, it was the most challenging Ginter Code program to date -- not necessarily in terms of sheer difficulty, but in terms of number of total hours required to complete the program.  The 2014 program was divided up into 25 "mini-codes", effectively called points.  Solve a mini-code, score a point.  Not all points were created equally (this is the understatement of the century).  Some depended on advanced skills, knowledge, and research ... and some depended on just being in the right place at the right time.  We scored a few of each, and in the end ... it was enough to win.  :)

The team consisted of myself (@calculusdork), Jim Melichar (@meli0029), and Brian Duginske (@w0rstbeat). Each of us has a unique set of skills, and we work very well together. For this contest, I created a new Twitter account, @ParanoidAndrew.  I derived the name from one of the Codemaster's first tweets of the contest back in September 2014, when he was laying down the rules:

1 - I want to see the knives come out, so this one's for points! No more one right answer. Now there's scads of 'em! #thegintercode

— Ginter Code (@TheGinterCode) September 2, 2014

I took this as a musical reference to the Radiohead song "Knives Out" (one of the early points ended up being 'musical', so to speak), picked my favorite Radiohead song ("Paranoid Android"), and created a new persona, which was fun in its own right.

One quick thing I would like to mention up-front, so that maybe we can invoke some Codemaster feedback here ... this contest had to have been BRUTAL for the CM. He initially planned to have everything released by the end of October 2014, and probably more realistically by the end of the year, but I think he drastically underestimated the amount of effort that would be required to develop 25 mini-codes that maintained difficulty and integrity. I keep calling them "mini-codes", but some of these nearly could have stood on their own as full-on Ginter Code contests. We put in more hours on this thing than I would care to admit, but a large part of that was due to the complex and interesting nature of many of the points. Hope the CM will chime in and provide some feedback (on that topic, and anything else as he sees fit).

So ... about the points. The plan here is, as time allows, to slowly walk through the solutions for each of the 24 points that were released. For this, I will be requesting some inputs from my competitors, if they are so willing. As such, you will see me making frequent calls and references to our fiercest competitor, Team @BosunKnows. (Honestly, my team never did figure out how to solve a handful of the points.) To get this started, I really don't have any preference on where we start. So how about this -- which point do YOU want to see the solution for? I will compose one blog entry per point solution, to keep things clean. The blog is titled "Singularity Awaits", which was the solution for one of our favorite points ... so if there are no requests, I will start there. :)

- Grant