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A comment on Engine Yard Programming Contest - Win an iPhone 3GS PLUS $2k in Cloud Credit. Parent comment

Re:Engine Yard Programming Contest - Win an iPhone 3GS PLUS ... by sunir on Wednesday July 15, 2009 @01:40AM (#705222)
10 is a stretch. After a couple hours of computing several hundreds of millions of attempts, the best I achieved was a distance of 43 bits (assuming duplicate words are acceptable).

jruby rubinius MRI Cloud postgresSQL record MRI exception record mongrel tokyo Cloud

This task is so unbalanced as a contest. The thought of spending a couple hundred dollars of cloud computing time to just buy more 'lottery tickets' for $3000 worth of prizes (assuming you could use the cloud time) is too much of a stretch for me.

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Re:Engine Yard Programming Contest - Win an iPhone 3GS PLUS ... by 0wned on Thursday July 16, 2009 @08:43AM (#707780)
10 is a huge stretch. My testing in C++ agrees with you. The lowest score I've gotten is 41 after about 12 hours. Sure, I may get lucky and get one in the high 30's or something, but it would just be blind luck and persistence, nothing more. Not a very cool contest IMO.
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