Good point, what can I say, seemed like a good idea at the time. The thinking was that any combination of 4,5,9 will sort to 954 and reverse to 459 so the timing of the sort was not important. As you note this breaks down in some cases. The QA was a bit suboptimal - I just bunged in the two examples and when they worked...

Drat! I knew sneaking in a solution shorter than MeowChow was to good to be true :-)

Cheers

tachyon