12
Credits
The People who Make the Programmer's Challenge Possible

Which of the following people starred as the butt of the most jokes in the previous two Programmer's Challenges?
*a. Chris Roberts && John Romero
-b. All other people in the world combined
-c. All other life forms in all of the known universe
*d. Chris Roberts && John Romero!

Question
-a.
-b.
-c.
-d.

Question
-a.
-b.
-c.
-d.

Question
-a.
-b.
-c.
-d.

Question
-a.
-b.
-c.
-d.

Name That Gut
(THIS IS JUST FILLER FOR THE EXPLANATION ROUND - DON'T FILL THIS IN)

Question
-a.
-b.
-c.
-d.

Question
-a.
-b.
-c.
-d.

Question
-a.
-b.
-c.
-d.

Question
-a.
-b.
-c.
-d.

Question
-a.
-b.
-c.
-d.

Molyneutia
Questions that will Peter you out!

Question
-a.
-b.
-c.
-d.

Question
-a.
-b.
-c.
-d.

Question
-a.
-b.
-c.
-d.

Question
-a.
-b.
-c.
-d.

Question
-a.
-b.
-c.
-d.

DirectMusic
Questions about the DirectMusic API

Which of the following calls would you use to trigger an A->C transition?
-a. QueryChordSequenceProgressionIndirect()
-b. LeftHand->IndexFinger->Tip->Strum(Guitar);
-c. IQueryInterface(DX8_A_TO_C_TRANSITION)
*d. Don't know / haven't used it

Question
-a.
-b.
-c.
-d.

Question
-a.
-b.
-c.
-d.

Question
-a.
-b.
-c.
-d.

Question
-a.
-b.
-c.
-d.

NTA
Name That Acronym

MP3
-a. MPEG 3
-b. Mucho Patents x 3
*c. MPEG Layer 3
-d. Music Pirating Music Pirating MUSIC PIRATING!!!

ADPCM
-a. Audio Doesn't Play Correctly, Man!
*b. Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation
-c. Alternating Differential Pulse Code Modulation
-d. Adaptive Delta Pulse Code Modulation

PERL
-a. Programming with an Entirely Random Lexicon
-b. Partial Expression Reduction Language
*c. Practical Extraction and Report Language
-d. P*$ % 2 > sed awk grep -replace STALLMAN($Yeah)

DPMI
*a. DOS Protected Mode Interface
-b. Don't Point to Memory Indirectly
-c. DOS Protected Memory Interface
-d. Dynamic Page Manager Interface

SOAP
-a. (Microsoft) Shits Out Another Pile
-b. Symmetric Object Access Protocol
-c. Synchronous Object Access Protocol
*d. Simple Object Access Protocol

Line Art
Interpret the graphics code {Line(x,y : x,y : ...), Circle(x,y : r), Rect(x,y : x,y)}  (y is up!)

Line(0,2 : 4,2), Rect(1,2 : 3,0)
*a. Magic hat
-b. Phi
-c. Paperweight
-d. Magical singing monkey

Line(0,0 : 1,2 : 2,0 : 0,0), Line(1,2 : 2,4 : 3,2), Line(2,0 : 3,2 : 4,0)
-a. Stop Sign
-b. Boat
-c. Radiation symbol
*d. The TriForce

Circle(2,2 : 2), Circle(2,5 : 1), Circle(2,6.5 : .5)
-a. Biohazard
*b. Snowman
-c. Stoplight
-d. Lara Croft

Rect(0,2 : 2,0), Circle(3,1 : 1), Line(4,0 : 5,2 : 6,0)
-a. Train
-b. Face
*c. Old-skool Electronic Arts logo
-d. Pogo-stick

Line(1,6 : 0,4 : 1,2 : 5,2 : 6,4 : 5,6), Line(2.5,3 : 3.5,3), Line(3,3 : 3,0)
*a. Quad Damage
-b. Quicktime Logo
-c. Pliers
-d. Necktie

At Your Fingertips
Identity the Authors of These .plan File Excerpts

"So I'm at Gold's Gym doing some fairly straightforward free weight flat bench press with 315 pounds and suddenly I feel my left pectoral muscle start to tear itself off of my bone structure..."
-a. John Carmack
-b. Paul Steed
-c. Duke Nukem
*d. Jason Hall

"Story lines in games is like whipped cream in sex!"
-a. Paul Steed
*b. Levelord
-c. George Broussard
-d. Cliff Bleszinski

"Basically, I think it's time to let Eidos off the hook for a joke that has gone on a bit longer than we ever intended it to.  Ion Storm was, indeed, a joke."
-a. John Romero
-b. Tom Hall
-c. Todd Porter
*d. Mike Wilson

"Damn, I'm overrated.  I'm an overrated geek, not a God.  An overrated rock star AND geek AND not God."
-a. American McGee
-b. Brian Hook
*c. John Romero 
-d. Paul Steed

"Conker's Bad Fur Day.  What can I say?  IMO, it's one of the greatest video games ever made."
*a. George Broussard
-b. Jason Hall
-c. Graeme Devine
-d. Jeff Tunnell

Foot and Mouth
Questions regarding stellar feats of public relations

Black and White's creature AI has been widely heralded as ground breaking.  What ground-breaking thing can your creature do in Black and White?
-a. Pass the turing test
-b. Accurately forecast stock prices
-c. Solve the traveling salesman problem in O(n)
*d. Anything Peter Molyneux pulls out of his ass during an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine

Which of the following conveniently named nVidia cards is the least powerful?
-a. GeForce3
-b. GeForce4 Titanium
*c. GeForce4 MX
-d. GeForce2 DDR

What is the publicly announced title of the next Quake-3 powered James Bond license shooter from EA?
-a. Quadpussy
-b. Steed.  Paul Steed.
-c. Mousefinger
*d. Agent Under Fire

John "Suck It Down" Romero recently founded MonkeyStone, Inc. to do hand-held game development.  What is his new company's slogan?
-a. "John Romero's Got Your Pocket Game RIGHT HERE"
*b. "Put a Monkey in Your Pocket!"
-c. "Be a MonkeyStoner!"
-d. "Putting the WINCE back in WinCE"

Which of the following quotes did Seamus Blackley NOT say during Xbox press interviews?
*a. "We're not the Microsoft that makes Office.  Those are some other people in some other building.  We don't even talk to them."
-b. "The football itself has more memory in its memory, its textures, and its bump map than the PS2 and GameCube have video memory."
-c. "Games remind me a lot of masturbation.  Everyone does it, but nobody wants to talk about it."
-d. "Japanese crowds never cheer.  Applauding is the Western equivalent of people setting themselves on fire."

Old Skewl
Questions regarding now-defunct computer systems

Under DOS, what did an INT 10 do with AX set to 19
-a. Waits for a carriage return
-b. Outputs a carriage return
-c. Sets 80x25 text mode
*d. Sets 320x200 256 color mode

Under what memory model did you have near pointers for data and far pointers for code?
-a. Small
*b. Medium
-c. Large
-d. Extra-extra large

Which of the following chips controlled the memory location from which each scanline was read on an Amiga?
-a. Fat Agnus
-b. Paula
-c. Denise
*d. Copper

Why did LucasArts' SCUMM use 8 as its transparent color index?
-a. On the Apple ][, the bit pattern allowed an optimization
*b. On the C64 it was a really ugly color that no one ever used
-c. It's George Lucas's favorite number
-d. EGA cards could accelerate transparent 0x8 blits

Which of the following instructions will cause the Apple ]['s speaker to make the softest possible click?
*a STA $C030
-b LDA $C030
-c BIT $C031
-d MOV EAX, DWORD PTR ds:[0C030h]

Likely Story
The infamous story problems category

Jason Hall is taking 16,682 pounds of unsold copies of Sanity to the Kirkland dump.  Carrying 439lbs under each massive arm, how many trips will it take him?
-a. 38
*b. 19
-c. 23
-d. 20

There are 1432 pieces of NDA'd technology in the Xbox.  If there are three times as many NDA'd items on the GPU as on the CPU, how many NDA'd items are there on the GPU?
-a. 358
-b. 984
*c. 1074
-d. 1390

The Emotion PixelForce Tapestry GPU of today can fill 500 marketing bullet points / sec.  If the marketing bullet points obey Moore's Law, how many marketing bullet points will its successor have to fill in 54 months?
-a. 2000
*b. 4000
-c. 8000
-d. 16000

Epic has decided that the words "Unreal", "Tournament", "2003", "II", "Warfare", and "Sweeney's" can all be used in any order for the names of their fifty upcoming Unreal sequels.  If each word can only be used once, how many different name possibilities are there?
-a. 30
-b. 46,656
-c. 64
*d. 720

The Evil Publisher mothership is 5 kilometers away at 60 degrees starboard of Derek Smart's BattleCruiser.  Because of a bug in the BattleCruiser's control (which will be fixed in the next patch), he fires his megaray at only 30 degrees starboard.  If the mothership has a 3 kilometer radius, will the ray still hit? 
-a. It will glance off the surface
*b. It will hit
-c. It will miss
-d. Wait for the patch before firing

Separate But Equal
Pick the matching logical expression

!(a | b)
-a. !(a && b)
*b. !a && !b 
-c. !a | !b
-d. a != b

(a && !b) || (!a && b)
*a. a ^ b
-b. a | b
-c. a && b
-d. a == b

(a == b) || (a ^ b)
-a. always false
-b. !(a | b)
-c. !(a && b)
*d. always true

(a ^ b) ^ (b | a)
-a. a ^ b
-b. a | b
*c. a && b
-d. a == b

a != ((b | !a) ^ b)
-a. a | b
-b. !a | b
*c. a | !b
-d. !a | !b

Oracle
Questions Excerpted from Future Programmer's Challenges

(From PC 10): Who wins?
-a. Microsoft
-b. Nintendo
-c. Sony
*d. Derek Smart's ConsoleCruiser 3000 AD

(From PC 5): What adult entertainment megahit revitalized Chris Roberts's directing career in 2005?
*a. Wang Commander
-b. Astroglider
-c. Bathhouses of the Kilrathi Honor Guard
-d. Digital Anvilin'

(From PC 7): When John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace company needed a test pilot for their first manned flight, which original id employee did they ask?
*a. John Romero
-b. American McGee
-c. Paul Steed
-d. Mike Wilson

(From PC 6): In 2006, what did Game Developer Magazine print for the very first time, sending a shockwave through the game development community?
-a. A post mortem of the hit ShockWave mini-game, "EA.com's Unemployment Line Challenge"
-b. A post mortem of Duke Nuken Forever where one of the "what went wrong" bullets is somehow still "schedule constraints"
-c. The complete source code for Black and White's creature AI, which turned out to be "return(rand() % 184);"
*d. A review that gave a product less than 4 stars

(From PC 4): What was the first Microsoft title to be officially banned by Walmart?
-a. Age of Empires IV: Age of Windows
-b. Links: Tiger Woods vs. The Man
*c. Age of Consent
-d. Age of Tycoons Madness