HHC 2014 Programming Contest

[Neil Hamilton]

(09-28-2014 01:39 PM)David Hayden Wrote:  The criteria for the contest was for size only.

Actually it did have a few more constraints, "all programs must return the correct answers to qualify" among them.

I cannot hope to compete with the Gods of HP Calculators in terms of size or speed. I am nowhere near talented enough. :-)

My only goal was to run through ALL the years and see what I got. For that, 70 s/yr -- or even 23 s/yr -- was not going to cut it. That is the main reason I was looking to pick up the speed.

Having built a program that was suffiently quick (< 1 s/yr for a small range of years), and having obtained the definitive list, I was a bit surprised that my list was longer than the the definitive one. That is my biggest puzzle right now.

I am also wondering why the performance dropped to ~1.25 s/yr when run against a set with an ~8400 year span. The only thing I can think of is that since I push my answers to the stack and with 1000-odd entries on the stack, that might be slowing it down. My output was a string per PDP something like this "31.016401, 1.026401" -- not very compact. Any thoughts?