Speed of HP-15C LE - and it's capabilities

[Dave Britten]

(05-13-2014 08:20 PM)Jeff_Kearns Wrote:  I am always amazed at the incredible ingenuity of current and former forum contributors in solving puzzles and mini-challenges, and the various programming techniques used. I would like to tackle the various problems in the Project Euler website one day to see if the HP-15C can handle them all.

I'm pretty sure that the 15C wouldn't be able to handle them ALL, as I recall doing at least a few problems that required a pretty substantial* input data set, or some kind of string manipulation.

However, I'd also wager that a very large percentage could be tackled with a non-alphanumeric programmable, as most of them center around finding an algorithm that performs much better than the obvious brute force approach.

(*Substantial for a 15C, at least, unless you want to devise a way to stream-process 10+ KB of manually keyed data. A 41C with enough extra hardware could probably get a lot closer to the "all" mark, and I'm pretty confident the palmtops would have little trouble if you can handle entering that much code on the tiny keyboard.)