Glass Sculpture
  ---------------

  My first idea was that I wanted to make something with photons. Of course
everything that is needed in order to make photons to work in the first
place uses so many so long keywords, so there would not be too much space
for the scene itself. But I wanted to try anyways.

  After discarding a lathe idea because it would have taken way too much
space, I decided to try to build an object by merging spheres. After
trying quite many variations on how to create the spheres, I came up
with something I could be happy with:

#macro C(N,S)
  sphere { <sin(N) rand(S) cos(N)> .5 }
  #if(N) C(N-1 S) #end
#end

merge { C(70 seed(3)) ... }

  This gave something which was not too simple but also not too random.

  Of course the spheres alone wouldn't do anything (and would be rather
useless with regard to the photons), so I added a plane as a floor.

  After quite some fine-tuning, I came up with this version of the scene:

global_settings{photons{count 1e6}
  #macro C(N,S)
    sphere{<sin(N)rand(S)-.6cos(N)+5>.5photons{target refraction 1}}
    #if(N)C(N-1S)#end
  #end}
merge
{C(70seed(3))
  plane{y,-1pigment{rgb<1,.6>}}
  pigment{rgbf 1}finish{ior 1.5reflection.3phong 2}
  rotate-x*9}
light_source{9,1}

  The problem with this was that, when all needless whitespace is removed,
it takes exactly 257 bytes. There just isn't anything that can be removed
from there without affecting negatively the quality of the image. Changing
the color of the plane to red would decrease the size of the file, but
the image is much uglier. The 'rotate' could be removed, but the resulting
image is not as nice. I didn't want to remove the entire 'rotate' just
because of one single byte.
  Another slight bummer here is that the plane is not reflective, even
though I really wanted it to be.

  However, I didn't lose hope. The 'pigment' keyword is repeated twice
inside the same merge block, and I just wanted to remove this duplication.
After trying tons of the most ingenuous and unimaginable tricks I could
come up with in order to remove the duplication of the 'pigment', it
suddenly just hit me and I came up with the idea that is used in the
entry that I submitted. With the new idea the code looked like this:

global_settings{photons{count 1e6}#macro C(P,N,S)pigment{P}finish{ior
1.5reflection.3phong 2}}#if(N)sphere{<sin(N)rand(S)-.6cos(N)+5>.5photons
{target refraction 1}C(rgbf 1N-1S)#end#end}merge{plane{y,-1C(rgb<1,.6>
70seed(3))rotate-x*9}light_source{9,1}

  And what was just absolutely great, I could give the plane the same
finish as the spheres, so the plane got its reflection and phong too!

  Now I had one small problem: The entry was 250 bytes! I had 6 bytes
to spare! How could I use these 6 bytes for something useful?

  I could have used 5 bytes to get variable reflection on the objects,
but since it didn't make too much of a difference, it seemed just a waste,
so I didn't use that. I want every character to count, to do something
useful, something visible, and the variable reflection just didn't make
enough difference to count, so I left it out.
   Another option was to use 3 characters to add a blue component to the
color of the plane, making a more elaborated color than just rgb <1,.6>.
Since I couldn't think of anything more useful, I did that. Thus the
entry was 253 bytes long.

  After that I came up with another idea: Is the rand() really necessary?
I tried to see what happens if I just substitute it with N/70. The result
was actually not bad at all. Definitely not worse than with the rand().
  This allowed me to remove the seed code completely, thus making the
scene just 240 bytes long. iow. giving me a whopping 16 free characters.

  I immediately knew what I wanted: Area light.
  I tried it, but it made the scene a few characters too long. Bummer.
  Then I looked more into the code and... doh! The two 'rgb' keywords
could be merged into one!
  After doing that, the scene was exactly 256 bytes long, and most
probably cannot be reduced without changing the looks of the scene.
So, it's rather optimal. Over half of this (148 characters) went onto
setting up photons, textures and lighting (so only 108 characters were
used for actual object creation).