Programmer's Challenge

Write an engine to accumulate, in minimum execution time, the most points in a round-robin tournament of the board game Pente™. My solution won and was published in the magazine. "Jeff's entry, however, was more efficient about pruning the search tree and therefore required significantly less execution time than Randy's entry. Since a point was deducted for each second of execution time, the winning entry lost significantly fewer points for inefficiency." Later, I converted this into a plug-in engine for Zillions of Games.

Write an Othello engine in C to win a round robin on an arbitrarily-sized NxN board, winning by the largest margins with penalties for time. I won and had the code published in the magazine. From the comments: "Uses alpha-beta search with iterative deepening, transposition tables, extension for solving, futility cut-off. a simplistic selectivity. etc." Later, I converted Jello to a plug-in engine for Zillions of Games.

Quickly rotate bitmaps of arbitrary pixel size.
My solution came in 3rd out of 16 entries in terms of speed, but got published anyway: "Jeff Mallett (Hickory, NC) deserves praise for his extremely small solution which was also near the top in terms of speed. Because it is so small, it is listed here as well"

Write a routine to return the index of given city in a long list of cities, or if there is no exact match, return the five closest in name, in the least amount of time. My entry tied for 1st out of 16 entries, but not published as it was the longer solution.

Write an engine to earn victories in a round robin tournament in the game of Hex, with the score reduced based on execution time. My entry came in 2nd place with a score of 79.98 vs. the winner's score of 80.08, so did not get published. I did convert the code into a plug-in engine for Zillions of Games.

Write a "Replace All" routine (which may have to grow the handle) executing in the shortest time possible. My routine finished 2nd out of 17 entries (60 ticks vs. the winner's 54) and so did not get published.