ACCU C++ Countdown Pub Quiz

The ACCU conference is one of the highlights of my year. I ran a brand new session, a C++ Pub Quiz with an emphasis on fun and interaction, based loosely on the popular UK TV game show Countdown.

In the TV version, contestants play individually and have 30 seconds to find the longest word using only a small set of letters. In this version, contestants play in teams, and have ~7 minutes to write the smallest valid C++ program containing a small set of tokens.
For example, if the tokens were:

catch -> [ ; -- foobar operator

Then a winning program (53 character program) might be:

class c {
  c operator->(){
    foobar: try{
    }
    catch(c x[]){
        x--;
    }
  }
};

We used cyber-dojo with some custom C++17 start-points which automatically told you your program's size and score. The rules were as follows:

• The judges decision was final
• Only non-whitespace characters were counted
• Programs had to compile
• Warnings were allowed
• Extra tokens were allowed
• Each token has to be a single whole token. For example the . token had to be the member access token; you could not use ... ellipsis or 4.2 floating point literal

The winners and the tokens were as follows (can you find smaller programs?)

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Round 1: snakes, 75 character program, dynamic_cast snafu += return switch final

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Round 2: wolves,koalas tied, 54 character program, catch ; foobar operator -- [

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Round 3: frogs, 62 character program, else ~ default -> using foobar 0x4b

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Round 4: tigers, 44 character program, string include for auto template 42

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Round 5: pandas, tigers tied, 82 character program, virtual typename x reinterpret_cast static_cast 30ul

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Round 6: wolves, 64 character program, constexpr override goto wibble . this

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The raccoons and lions won the conundrum rounds.

The result was very close.
In 3rd place snakes with 481 points.
In 2nd place alligators with 488 points.
In 1st place tigers with 495 points.
A big thank you to my co-presenter Rob Chatley, to all the contestants for being such good sports, and to Bloomberg for sponsoring the Quiz.