Comment by bostik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bostik | Hacker News Reader

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I think this particular bit says it all. To get blazingly fast results...

> I can say with great confidence that we all cheated.

But I disagree with the word used.

Pre-computing the hash-table and embedding that into the final binary to eliminate relatively expensive calculations when it matters? That's not cheating, that's effing brilliant.

Hard-core software engineering, that's what it is. There's also a saying that the only people who play fair are those who don't know how to cheat well enough.

Well done.

(edit: typos)

Op here, just wanted to say thanks. Of course it is not cheating in the sense that I tricked the system to give me a better score than warranted but my solution only works for this ONE dictionary so.. maybe it is not cheating but using tighter assumptions than those which were provided by the original task description :-)

The problem description did say:

    # Our test cases will always use the same dictionary file (with SHA1
    # 6b898d7c48630be05b72b3ae07c5be6617f90d8e).

The cheat is that he used a separate process to build hash table for real time look up, which is different from reading the data from the file at run time.

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