HHC 2017 RPL Programming contest information and results thread

[Claudio L.]

(09-18-2017 09:34 PM)pdo Wrote:  Nice! That's a really clever idea. I'll have to play around with that myself too.

Paul

Actually, the idea came from Gene himself. On page 2 of the PDF, he shows different fractions for 8/11, and I saw the huge difference in terms of score between the one that ends in 1/37+1/4070 and the last one that has 1/70+1/77.
Both sums of fractions give 3/110, so they are numerically equivalent, but the sum of the denominators isn't (and it kills the score!).
So I set to code an algorithm to search for these better pairs of numbers, as I thought that was the true nature of the problem.
I didn't quite achieve it, as my algorithm soon degenerated in the abomination I posted, but the resulting code can drastically reduce the score (even if the resulting lists are not exactly desirable).