Make it LOOK good!

In the summer term 1995 I took a class about Programming in Prolog. To pass the class you had to be successful in a series of contests held in the last week of the term. Each morning problem sets were handed out which you had to solve in teams of three. You were not allowed to leave the University before all problems were solved. If you weren't finished in the evening, you failed the class.

I was in a team with Berno and Stefan and we passed the contests from Monday to Thursday.

Then, on Friday, they handed out just one problem - but this one was awfully difficult. We had to implement a strategy game (which you could play against the computer) with a graphical user interface.

We were the only team that concentrated on the GUI first, all the other teams started with developing the computer's strategy.
It turned out that it was extremely easy to write the GUI because we had a really good library for graphical functions. We were so excited about the graphical effects we could create that we kept improving our GUI.

Some hours later, our program looked fantastic. Unfortunately we didn't have an algorithm for the computer strategy yet, so you couldn't play a game. The other teams, however, didn't succeed in developing a working algorithm for a winning computer strategy - so with their programs you couldn't play a game and you didn't see a GUI either.

In the evening Andrea Hemprich, the chief judge, reviewed the programs. The other teams just admitted that their programs didn't work. We, however, started a presentation like this:
"Here you see the initial game board position. With this button you can change the sides, here you can rotate the board, zoom in, zoom out, select the background image (default was a nice pinguin), watch the groovy animation when the game starts,..."
"Whhoooooooaaaaahhhhh! This is fantastic. You wrote this program in just a few hours?"
"Yeah."

She was completely satisfied with our work. She didn't want to see any more functions of the program and we passed the class.

It turned out later that the difficulty degree of the problem was selected in such a way that not any team was able to solve the problem completely. The judges knew that in advance. They just wanted to see how far the teams would get. Everyone who passed the contests from Monday to Thursday passed the class.


Mark Dettinger
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