Re: $100 Contest Question
Chris Bensler writes:
> What platform will be used to test with? To be fair,
> it would have to be tested on all 3.
I'll use DOS. It's a bit inconvenient to boot into Linux.
> What if one entry only works on a specific platform,
> but is faster than all others for that platform?
It should be easy to make your program work on all platforms,
but if a program fails on DOS, but works on Linux or Windows,
I'll measure its time on a system it works on (on the same machine)
and decide if there is any unfairness. A program like that
can still win, but won't be eligible for the $5 bonus.
> What are the valid match characters for Contest#2? A-Z and a-z?
> What about hyphens, and apostrophes?
As Derek suggested,
if a '-' or '\'' is supplied (or some character greater than ASCII 32),
it should be treated as a literal character to be matched. Values
from 0 to 32 represent "meta" characters, or placeholders for
unspecified characters in the pattern. I'll only give you upper case
literal characters, A, B, C, ...
Euman writes:
> Can I have text length files? what I mean is word files that are
> seperated by the length of their text?
I'm not sure what you mean.
On problem #2 you must use Junko's dictionary (word list),
because I will be determining correctness based on
the words in that particular dictionary. If you want to reformat
her file into a different file, that's fine, but the time that it
takes to do that will be included in your total time.
You can assume that there is enough memory to store
the 51802 words in memory (unless you store them in a
bizarrely inefficient way).
I'll be using a machine with 64 Mb of RAM.
On problem #3 you can use any dictionary, formatted
any way you like, but I think Junko's is quite reasonable.
Martin Stachon writes (privately):
> After the load of the wordlist, how many times you will
> call the function?
In problem #2, assume that I will make 1000
calls to your function.
Derek Parnell writes:
> On a similar point I made the assumption that a pattern of {4,6,9} is
> equivalent to {1,2,3}. In other words, the actual value of the pattern
> characters is not important, only that they represent a unique character in
> the target word(s).
Yes, that's correct.
Aku writes:
> (Problem #1) How is the time calculated?
> How many iteration (loops) will it be tested?
I'm planning to run each program once,
with a few megabytes of input text.
I'll actually do it a few times each,
and ignore the first run,
since the first time, the data won't be in
the operating system's memory cache.
Aku writes:
> (Problem #1) Will the input contain byte 0 ?
No. It will consist of the cipher line plus
many lines of English text - no weird characters,
no huge (over 1000 characters) lines.
I'll add these points to the Web page later today.
Regards,
Rob Craig
Rapid Deployment Software
http://www.RapidEuphoria.com
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