With another Wolfram Technology Conference comes the latest round of the annual One-Liner Competition. Participants are challenged to show off their Wolfram Language skills in this contest of brevity and creativity by using only 140 or fewer characters to share the most incredible and original output.

This year also featured the second-ever Get Visual Competition, where users flex their artistic flair to create a piece of computational art without a character restriction.

In both competitions, entries from conference participants were judged anonymously by Wolfram staff. Judging criteria were based on aesthetics, understanding of the output and original use of Wolfram Language.

One-Liner Competition

The One-Liner Competition tests a user’s ability to create a unique and exciting output in 140 or fewer characters without using 2D typesetting constructs or pulling in linked data.

Third Place

Oliver Knill: Graph Counter (133 characters)

Oliver Knill, also a winner of this year’s Innovator Awards, submitted a function that counts the number of complete subgraphs within a graph and returns it in a polynomial function form. Knill submitted his 133-character line as a function and included an example of the function in use. The judges appreciated his originality and use of recursive function definition as well as the challenge of deciphering the short code:

Second Place

Dashel Myers: Animating a Contour Plot (137 characters)

Dashel Myers created a stunning visual in just 137 characters with his animated contour plot. Judges enjoyed the kaleidoscope-like output and found the boxy visual to be amusing:

First Place

Catalin Popescu: LLM Zoo (140 characters)

Catalin Popescu, who received an honorable mention in 2020’s One-Liner Competition, was this year’s first-place winner with LLM Zoo. At exactly 140 characters, this one-liner utilizes one of the new LLM functions to select six random animals and combine them two at a time. Judges found this submission extremely amusing and had a lot of fun running it over and over to see the wacky combinations it produced:

Get Visual Competition

Guenther Gsaller: Atrium

Guenther Gsaller is no stranger to uniting Wolfram Language and the visual arts. Gsaller’s submission to the Get Visual Competition featured his hand at architecture with an atrium developed in Wolfram and then rendered in Blender, a 3D graphics software. He has been recognized as a featured contributor on Wolfram Community many times for his series of posts on animating Wolfram surfaces with Blender and on the Wolfram Blog.

Share Your Own Creations

Congratulations to the winners and all who participated in this year’s competitions! We look forward to seeing next year’s submissions. Until then, we encourage you to share your own one-liners and computational art at Wolfram Community.

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