This is the second year I try to have some fun with python and the Google Code Jam.
This year I almost forgot about it, and started the challenge when almost half of the time was gone. Anyway I managed to complete almost half of the problems, which seemed pretty good to me, given that I spent just a few hours trying.
Unfortunately, my last attempt timed out by 3 minutes (out of 8 available) when trying to compute the result, which later proved correct. This reminded me about the importance of performance in my code: a little optimization of the code after my try gave it a speedup of 3x, which would have been enough to submit the result in time.
Anyway, both this and the last year I qualified for the second round. Last year I didn’t pass it, this year I hope to do better.
