Well, it's an embarrassing thing to be proud of, but I had the longest non-Acme'd working solution, at just under 1000 characters.
As you'll see in the comments, I wasn't even trying to make it long. It's just that the algorithm is hard, and I wanted to get something working at all before removing all the whitespace and stuff. The point of all of this is that newbies might want to take a look at it, first because it does a relatively unobfuscated job of following the requirements. In addition, it turns out that I used pretty much the same algorithm for my winning entry, with a few sneaky tweaks. So you could look at some of my other solutions (Um, don't look too hard at the "formline" ones.) and see the shortening process in action. See for example my 198, 217, 226, 250, 267, 297, 309. Hopefully in reverse order. The changes between each version are pretty small. 336 is almost the same as the 980, minus whitespace. Not that I'm trying to brag here -- I don't have much to brag about. Actually, following anyone's set of solutions (see Yanick's BOG to get just one person's solutions -- once Y has updated his site, that is!) would be useful. Just that mine has such an easy starting point. Amir Karger CuraGen Corporation
