It was a tricky competition to judge for several reasons. Firstly, the entries were of such a high standard. Then they evolved, forked and cross-pollinated. It was also interesting to see the mutual help going on. It was like watching a horse-race where the front-running horses harnessed themselves together and crossed the finish line together. Actually, there were horses everywhere since some people seemed to end up with three or more submissions.

Joe was very taken by the way that everyone had taken the trouble to read up on the theory of calculating primes and brought that knowledge to the task.

We certainly agonised about whether the use of the number table should have been taken into account in the timings. however, we felt that because Joe had hinted that we wanted contestants to use that, we felt we should take a broader view of the general presentation, portability, documentation of the code etc, as well as sheer performance, so it never became the key issue.

Well done to all the contestants; even the solution that I killed after it had taken 17 hours to calculate primes below 1000. It was fun to judge.