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POVRay Short Code Contest, Round 3

Posted by timothy on from the unbelievable dept.

An anonymous reader submits "The aim of the POVRay Short Code Contest SCC3 is to create an artistic work using POVRay (a free raytracing program) using only a limited number of bytes. The last round had an upper limit of 500 bytes and this round increased the challenge by reducing the maximum number of bytes to 256 (about 2 average length English sentences). This round saw some exceptional entries, an example of extreme image compression since these images can be created at any arbitrary resolution! The competition is now closed to entries and voting, which is open to the public, has started. The 51 entries can be viewed here. POVRay can be downloaded free from povray.org/."

9 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. fooey by Sparr0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is the kind of thing I hope to see posted on /. BEFORE the entry deadline. And preferably a sane time before, not 1 day like that PHP Blackjack thing. I would have very much enjoyed participating in this event.

    1. Re:fooey by yotaku · · Score: 5, Interesting

      One think I used to enjoy taking part in is TopCoder. They hold small online coding competitions that only take about an hour and a half to take part in - and are quite a lot of fun. Plus they are held about once a week. So you dont have to worry about missing one because there will always be another one just around the corner.

      http://www.topcoder.com

  2. Size coding by termos · · Score: 4, Informative

    Size coding can be a lot of fun, you should check by pouet (seem to be down right now) for some 256b, 128b and even 16b productions, 256b.com has some more.

    Very impressive stuff. :)

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  3. Re:Where's the code? by Sparr0 · · Score: 4, Informative

    RTFA. The site says the code will be released after the voting is completed.

  4. My favourites by Thornae · · Score: 4, Informative
    Here's a few that impressed me:
    "The Agate Face". An incredible piece. Could be a photo of the cliffs near where I grew up. I'm looking forward to seeing the code for this one.
    (No title)
    "City"
    "Simple"
    (No title)

    Also, the judging method is interesting:
    • Each voter will choose their six favourite images based upon artistic merit. A first choice will get 6 points, the second will get 5 points, and so on.
    • The gold place winner will be determined by dividing the total number of points awarded by the byte count.
    • The silver place winner will be the entry with the highest number of points.
    • The bronze place will go to the entry with the highest number of points divided by the square of the bytes used, this rewards the lower byte counts while still requiring an interesting image.


    Perhaps this entry is counting on getting a couple of votes and winning the bronze...
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    |>
    Here be Dragons
  5. Re:Red rectangle? by Cecil · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The author of cpo is aiming very squarely (excuse the pun) at third place. Check out this post for more information. Given the undoubtedly tiny number of bytes, if he even gets a few votes I think he's almost guaranteed a third place finish.

    Kind of an interesting approach at subverting the calculations for third place, but a bit against the spirit of things, so it won't get my vote.

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    Random and weird software I've written.
  6. Slashdot Contest Proposal by 0x0d0a · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think that Slashcode could benefit from a timeline model for stories, much like how some professional news sites work.

    It would be interesting to have an article that opens a timeline "The 2004 POVRay Small Code Contest", and one that closes it. The same would be true for "The SCO Lawsuit". Currently we have categories, but that doesn't exactly do the same thing.

    Plus, a lot of folks say "I'm not interested in Foo, and wish I didn't see stories about it", but if there were timelines, as soon as they see a timeline that they aren't interested in, they could omit it from their Slashdot story listing.

    Slashdot editors currently sometimes build ad-hoc timelines by reverse-linking stories to older stories in the same genre, but it's fairly rare that they do this.

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  7. Re:Nobody packages POVRay by John+Courtland · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I bought a book back in the day (DOS 6.22 was still very big but Win95 had just come out), on C++ Games Programming by Al Stevens and Stan Trujillo (from Dr Dobbs). It came with a CD containing various game creation tools. It was supposed to contain POVRay as a rendering tool, but according to the text, they had to drop POVRay from the CD because of a distribution deal with a different publishing house, I believe. Maybe the same problem here? Or maybe even POVRay doesn't want problems like that any longer so they don't allow distribution except through their methods? I haven't seen the website in a while, and I usually have little concern for the legal mumbo jumbo that adorns licensing agreements, so I may be wrong there.

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  8. POVRay license by 0x0d0a · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's true that the POVRay license is rather unusual, and does prohibit commercial distribution. (According to their legal page, the POVRay community has been apparently trying to move away from this to something more common...I hope the BSD or GPL license...and this will apparently be done with the v4 rewrite).

    The thing is, while Fedora can be now, I suppose, considered "commercial", Dag and Freshrpms are decidedly not commercial.

    Good thought...I suppose that could be the problem.

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    May we never see th