I think any of us could have done a better job.

As I said in an earlier post, I've made images infinitely better than that in 30 seconds in GIMP.

Looking at the winner's design and reading the comments you all posted made my evening very funny - I think I couldn't stop laughing for about 30 minutes, so I want to thank you folks and especially the author of this limit-breaking design for that.

why are most of the state winners pritty cool looking or atleast original while the winner is neither good looking or original?

Umm because aparently cheaters DO win! X(

what I ment is that most of the people who won at the state level put some effort into their designes why was the grand prize so diffrent.

Yeah, since most of the others ARE actually pretty decent...

My only regret is that I didn't make the ugliest design possible and write a voting script.
WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!
Cookies! Anybody who knows about the internet can tell you that IP adresses are the only safe way to do voting.
They deserve to have a bad design win.

how are you asigned an IP it would seem that there should be a way to get multiple IP's.

Realize that all dialup connections get a dynamic IP address, and I also know that my DSL line at home will get a new IP if the router resets.

Just what I was going to say...I could disconnect and connect again, then vote, as many times as I wanted.

Oh my God, that is *@%^ing hideous.

I just sent TI this e-mail:

I seriously suggest that you revoke the prize from the winner of the GraphiTI contest. The winner simply modified an existing design using MS Paint. Not to mention that the voting system was based on a cookie; when cookies were disabled, you could vote as many times as possible.

The winning is horribly ugly, and there were many talented, more deserving artists. An entry that took less than two minutes to create does not deserve to win over others that took hours - and TALENT.

It looks as though TI is full of genius ideas these days....

That is the most TASTELESS artwork I've ever seen! I've seen better artwork on the side of the road!

Not to mention their other bright ideas, like never updating the 86, but don't get me started. They just need some new management, or smarter engineers or at least someone with SENSE....

Well, unfortunately, it seems like they've become a huge corporation that's a lot more interested in making money and having inane marketing plans designed to sell calcs to airheads who care more about the color of the case than how it can be programmed than producing good calcs the way they were when they put out the 86, or 83+, or 89...

Well, realize you could base your design on one of the existing GraphiTI designs (so modifying an existing design is normal in this case.)

I doubt they would believe you... It's impossible to make a design using MS Paint. You have to make it using the Flash thingy they had on their site.

Fine, whatever. Still, it LOOKS like it was done in MS Paint.

And that's what matters.

Okay, why do a bunch of the state winners, and the overall winner, have the same tye dye background design, with other stuff added on top? But, yeah, the "MS Paint-style" words are horrific. There were a lot of better ones. And voting using cookies?! Can it get worse?

Why same background? Because they had an assortment of backgrounds you could choose from. It really required no talent nor time whatsoever.

Even though calcgames covered this when it was first announced, I'm doing everything in my power to keep us from posting news about it being done, the results are so hideous. Or, maybe I'll just post some fake news about it. I'm not sure yet.

Oh, I see. I didn't really know anything about the contest. I guess I've been out of touch with the TI community for a while. But still, some of the state winners did look decent. Like the Binary Matrix one for example. I liked that! But that overall winner...ohhh...I wouldn't touch it with a nine foot pole!

I wouldn't even touch it with a pi^2-foot pole.

well now... I wouldn't even think about getting close with a 9.99999999E99ft pole! what now :P

"Whats next?"

10E99? Because that's the highest non-infinite number the 68k series can handle, right?

It can do large integers. I can calculate on it 2^1000 (exactly). Note that this is ~1.071e301 (which it can approximate too.)

On the 68k series you can go beyond e99

yeah, but saying I wouldn't touch it with a "infinity" length pole is absurd...

Hmm... Cabamap can go WAY beyond 2^1000. Oh, maybe a 10^10^100 pole would appeal to you? "a googolplex length pole" doesn't sound that much better than "an infinity length pole", though.

You could do a googolplexian, i.e. 10^(10^(10^100))

Well actually, your pole would have to be non-continuous in that case, given that there aren't even close to that many particles in the entire universe...