Time's up.

The deadline was two days ago, and earlier today I processed the last couple of submissions. Here is the final tally:

• 18 people signed up for the contest.
• 5 people submitted solutions.
• 26 submissions passed a base-test run and were accepted.

The solutions are all over the place. It'll be a tough one to judge, but not impossible. Some solutions already stand out as exceptional. There are quite a few idioms in there that I hadn't seen before — and I keep discovering new ones.

Here's what I'll be doing in the next few days/weeks: for each task, I'll be putting together a blog post with discussion and code review, along with general discussion about efficiency and aesthetics. Consider it a five-episode series of being spoon-fed the best parts various solutions, with me doing the heavy chewing beforehand.

(Or, um, don't. That's a really gross metaphor. Eww! I should blog more often, and not let my mental analogy engine rust like this.)

Along with each blog post about a particular task, I'll also be putting up full listings of all sent-in solutions for that task. So you'll be able to browse around on your own and pick out the good parts and the bad.

So we'll have the walk-through of the five tasks, and then I'll announce the winner. This seems to have been what the people wanted, and I'm happy to oblige.

All clear? If so, next up will be task 1: "Find the optimal way to multiply a chain of matrices"!