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From: markspace <-@.>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer
Subject: Programming Challenge
Date: Wed, 16 May 2012 09:26:11 -0700
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Peter Norvig has a programming challenge on his website.  It's rather 
old, from 1999, and the premise is kind of off: compare Java to Lisp. 
However, ignoring the micro-benchmark discussion and the language vs. 
language debate, the problem itself is interesting.

<http://norvig.com/java-lisp.html>

So I went ahead and tried it.  I'm afraid I didn't do too well.  I 
misread the requirements (twice!) and part of the challenge is to 
measure your speed as a coder, so while I wasn't the most extreme data 
point (10 hours to code it up, iirc), I was well above the mean.

Anyway, now that I have it working, I found that the original input 
files are not available.  The website referenced is very old, and seems 
to get "tired" while downloading the large files.  So I'm wondering if 
any else would like to test their skills against Peter's and the rest of 
the sample, and share their solution.  I have a version which should be 
good and fast.  I did find one possible large optimization, and I'm 
wondering if other folks would find the same optimization, or handle the 
large search space in a different way.

Program to follow!  I'll let you work on it first before sharing my 
solution.  Don't forget to read the instructions, which say to produce a 
"professional" result, but also to keep the source to one file (which 
should make sharing over the internet easier).

ttfn