2 4 8 16 32 64... Storybytes, an ordered archive of nanofiction. It's been done before, by syllables (17), by the masters (Classic Short Stories), and by comedians (Book-a-Minute). But in a dense natural language, with a high meaning-per-word, perhaps bytes would value infodensity more objectively: 256b, 1k, 4Kb. But then again, isn't a spec as much of a cop out as a rigged dictionary? Perhaps the highest infodensities are achieved by works which will have no human readers.
posted on Feb 14, 2006 - View this thread

Project Euler is a running contest of programming challenges to hone your algorithm skills. "Each problem is designed according to a 'one-minute rule', which means that although it may take several hours to design a successful algorithm with more difficult problems, an efficient implementation will allow a solution to be obtained on a modestly powered computer in less than one minute."
posted on Aug 20, 2005 - View this thread

The Dark Side of Google? Google's first annual programming contest was a shrewd way to encourage Java and Python programmers. But this may be shrewder than the programmers who entered the contest realized. David Egnor may have nabbed a cool $10,000 as the contest winner, but for all the other entries, Google nabbed "worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, nonexclusive" rights.
posted on May 31, 2002 - View this thread

Go for the gold! Concord 2002: Site of the upcoming Loebner Prize. Can reigning champion A.L.I.C.E. repeat her triumph? Chat bots from around the globe are scouting out their rivals on the AI competitive circuit and studying their crib notes.
posted on Feb 9, 2002 - View this thread

Call it the 0.5k. Like a certain widely-heralded Web design contest, the Minigame competition pits clever programmers against each other to see who can do the most with the least. But instead of Web pages, these competitors create games for obsolete 8-bit computers (Atari, Commodore, etc.) in two weight classes: 2K and 512 bytes (!).
posted on Oct 18, 2001 - View this thread