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#1: Sarah Andrews (sarah) on Mar 4, 2011 [SPOILER]

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not exactly

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Must be made by a math major or at least someone with a lot of math hours.

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Those didn't show up until I was out of school for several years - and were horribly expensive for what they were. I would've loved one to play with, but I'd spent all my money on the computer. Relative to income, that was probably the most expensive toy I've ever bought.

If I remember correctly, my program was pretty short, but the real numbers involved was what slowed it down. Basically, I used the method I wrote in Iteration #4 (written in pascal).

Weak.

I thought, for a minuscule puzzle, it was clever.

Joe and Gator reminded me of a story....
I started teaching myself BASIC starting in 3rd grade on a Commodore PET. One day I was showing my dad some programs I had written and he set a challenge for us both. He said, "let's see who can make it draw the nicest spiral in the shortest time." He started scribbling on paper to figure out the trig equations he was going to use and i (not knowing trig) set out to solve it with math i did know. About 45 minutes later I said I was done, he was surprised but showed me his spiral. By that time he had gotten it to make one arcing rotation returning near the starting point (0 degrees) a short distance further from the origin. I set mine to go and he watched, smiling and shaking his head as the whole screen slowly filled from the center out with a consistent, tight, SQUARE spiral. He started being a lot more careful closing loopholes in challenges after that!

LOL. Great story David. :)

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