BrowserUk,
Since you don't seem to be able to see beyond a pissing contest between my heuristic and my heuristic stuck in a loop....

I am honestly not trying to be thick headed but I do not see what pissing contest you are referring to and for the record, nothing is stuck in a loop. I saw a way to refine your algorithm and asked for your input if you were interested. You could have simply said that you weren't.

I am sorry that you do not share my appreciation for exploring for exploration's sake but don't tell me there is no value in it. I have certainly learned a lot - something that may even be useful in the practical sense in the future.

As I have alluded to throughout this thread, I am exploring both heuristic solutions and guaranteed optimal solutions. Since you have made it clear that the only value to you that a heuristic solution has is if you can compare it to the known optimal solution over a large enough data set - I wrote an extremely infantile C brute force implementation that is able to check 3,129,836.24 solutions per second on a single CPU without any compiler optimizations. In other words, it only took 41 minutes to prove the best solution for this data is 446. For me, 41 minutes is still too long so I am exploring other techniques to get under 20 minutes but you weren't interested in that either.

Your solution, with my refinement, has found the optimal solution within 60 seconds for every random sampling I have been able to do today.

I won't continue to waste your time since you aren't interested. If you want to see the C (or the perl code to generate it) then feel free to /msg me.

Update: Adding compiler options gets the C brute force solution to complete all 7,758,767,016 possible solutions in 12 minutes and 24 seconds. I guess I don't need an ingenious solution for that part (10,417,514.7 solutions per second is fast enough for my purposes).

Cheers - L~R

In reply to Re^8: Challenge: Letter Power by Limbic~Region
in thread Challenge: Letter Power by Tanktalus

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