RUNS ✓2.5D ellipse + z-sortingSaturn ring, moon, labels
Complete and quietly sophisticated — planets pass in front of and behind the sun via depth sorting nobody asked for.
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Physics Lab · archive round
R5 · Creative coding: an animated solar system
Archive round — this round predates the blind-first layout, so answers appear with model names attached. Newer rounds keep the models anonymous until you reveal them.
Scores on this page are the original editorial 0–10 ratings from the 2026-07-17 write-up (writing / art-direction / runtime quality) — not blind rubric scores against a documented gold answer, which is how R31 onward are scored. The underlying answers are unchanged from that write-up.
Show task
An animated 2D solar system: glowing sun, 6 planets with distinct colors/orbits/speeds, at least one moon, faint orbit rings, starfield, planet labels. Starts immediately, runs forever, NO user input.
Answers
RUNS ✓bonus comet w/ tail on eccentric orbit
Spec-complete plus an uninvited comet. Charm counts; so does the fact that everything ran this time.
RUNS ✓planets named Noctis, Jovia, Vela, Pyra…
Renders beautifully — then invents its own planetary nomenclature. "A solar system" is defensible; the solar system was expected.
RUNS — BUTall planets aligned, sun oversized
Works, composes badly: a giant sun and a planetary conga line.
stray Cyrillic char inside a color string → SyntaxError
The overall runner-up ships a corrupted string literal — it even tried to .replace() its own typo at runtime. The parser got there first. Nobody is safe from Round 5.
parses fine, renders nothing
Silent failure — the hardest kind to debug, the easiest to rank.
SyntaxError — script never parses
Second parse error of the day for the local coder. Long files, fragile endings.