OpenEuphoria

Re: $100 Contest Question

• Posted by rforno at tutopia.com Mar 04, 2002
• 592 views

Maybe someone is interested in that I casually found the word BBUFFALOES
instead of BUFFALOES in Junko´s list. I don't know if there are other
errors.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Craig" <rds at RapidEuphoria.com>
To: "EUforum" <EUforum at topica.com>
Subject: 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
>
>
>
>