The 2024 Wolfram Technology Conference has ended, and we sent it off with our annual One-Liner Competition! Each year, 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 without using 2D typesetting constructs or pulling in linked data.

Entries from conference participants were judged anonymously by Wolfram staff. Judging criteria included aesthetics, understanding of the output and original use of Wolfram Language. Please note that entrants may have written one-liners on different versions of Wolfram. While our judges were able to verify each entry listed was fully functional, there may be errors generated in reproducing inputs based on your version.

Curious Mentions

This year, judges were so surprised by two entries that it was decided to add a “Curious Mentions” category for these amusing takes on the challenge.

Engage with the code in this post by downloading the Wolfram Notebook

James Wiles: Craft a 1st-Place One-Liner Competition Entry (140 characters)

James Wiles’s submission took a tongue-in-cheek approach by writing a one-liner (in exactly 140 characters) asking Wolfram’s LLMFunction to generate a “1st-place one-liner competition entry”:

Arnoud Buzing: Complicate the Code (130 characters)

Arnoud Buzing also decided to utilize Wolfram’s LLM functionality. Rather than asking for a short-and-sweet one-liner, Buzing opted to use LLMSynthesize to expand and over-complicate an initial piece of code (being “42” in this example), in 130 characters, to generate an output well over 140 characters. Judges found this inversion of the original challenge to be amusing and worthy of a curious mention:

🥉 Third Place

Nik Murzin: Face the Camera and Smile! 😀 (140 characters)

Nik Murzin’s interactive one-liner had judges striking poses in front of their web cameras! At exactly 140 characters, Face the Camera and Smile! uses two variants (text and image) of the CLIP feature extractor network to match your facial expression to the most similar emoji:

🥈 Second Place

Catalin Popescu: TWBI or Not TWBI (140 characters)

Catalin Popescu, who was the first-place winner of the 2023 One-Liner Competition, pulls in a documentation example animating a skull and combines it with synthesized speech for a clever short form of “to be or not to be” (twbi || ! twbi):

Judges were excited at the possibilities presented and took the opportunity to try out alternatives with “twbe” and “twdi”:

🏆🥇 First Place

Michael Sollami: StoryBookVideo (140 characters), TextAdventure (140 characters)

Michael Sollami, who was also the first- and second-place winner of the 2021 One-Liner Competition, wowed the judges with two entries this year.

StoryBookVideo utilized LLM synthesis to generate an eight-line story for children with accompanying visuals and narration:

TextAdventure generates an “choose-your-own-adventure” game featuring a day in the life of a randomly generated species using Wolfram’s Chat Notebook function:

Bonus Mentions

Andreas Hafver: Prismatic Polygons (135 characters)

Andreas Hafver’s submission created a bright and beautiful kaleidoscopic effect made of triangles in just 135 characters:

Zsombor Meder: Piano with PeanoCurve (138 characters)

Zsombor Meder’s one-liner produces a Baroque-sounding piano piece with a twist—the piece is composed using PeanoCurve, resulting in an amusing turn of phrase with Meder’s Peano piano:

Alejandra Ortiz: Angelic Visualizations (139 characters)

Alejandra Ortiz submitted a function using 139 characters that produced a stunning visualization that reminded judges of a kind of celestial throne:

Tommy Peters: Continuous Line Art for 3D Printing (139 characters)

Tommy Peters’s submission presents a function using ImageSynthesize that converts an image to a continuous line icon for 3D printing. Peters shared the example he had produced in testing of a continuous mushroom design:

Daniel Carvalho: Visualizing Flight Data (138 characters)

Daniel Carvalho presented a handy tool for frequent flyers in just 138 characters. Carvalho’s submission visualized flight data for specific airports using the recently updated functionality that allows users to access built-in Entity objects by pressing Ctrl + = and typing the desired entity in the input box (=[CMI] here):

Congratulations to the winners of the 2024 One-Liner Competition! Have more one-liners to share? Be sure to share them, and any other stunning projects, on Wolfram Community!