If I thought that this was homework, I wouldn't be doing it either!

But neversaint has a long history of posting deeply involved genomic programming tasks. And he is always more than willing to do his part in cleaning up and generalising what we post for his use.

I'm not sure whether he's making a fortune off of the help he gets here, or is on a research pittance furthering the science for the benefit of all human-kind. Nor do I much care.

He presents interesting problems, and I enjoy trying to solve them. It's far better than a cross-word or sudoku. (Besides, I wrote solvers for both of those years ago. Now if only I could get the computer to buy the papers and scan them in, they'd get used :)

Come to that. If neversaint's Perl/CS lecturer is presenting problems like these as "homework", he is either a brilliant lecturer with very gifted students; or a sadistic bastard.