HHC 2018 Programming Contests

[Joe Horn]

Roger Hill's RPN contest entry can be downloaded from HERE.

My observations about Roger's RPN entry:

• Uses a MOD algorithm (two "elegance" points)
• Outputs Extrema Date but not the biorhythms for that date.
• Roger told me that he understood the biorhythm function to be a smooth sine curve, not a step function, so his program does not calculate the biorhythm only at 24-hour increments, but also takes parts of days into account. For example, if you were born early in a day, a 100 or -100 could occur late in another day, and so on, thereby getting different Extrema Dates than if only exact 24-hour steps are considered. Although this certainly is an "elegant" approach, and arguably better than standard biorhythm calculations, I had to disqualify it due to outputs which are "incorrect" according to "Biorhythm Theory", which only calculates by whole number of days.
  

Roger also submitted an RPL entry which used the same logic and got the same outputs as his RPN entry (though much faster of course). This misunderstanding was indeed unfortunate, but Roger was a good sport about it... which I think deserves at least two additional "elegance" points for Roger.