We all know and love (!) the leaderboard, but how about a different method?

One can solve a problem with a simple, naive method resulting in a short program and long runtime, or put in lots of explicit optimizations for more code and shorter runtime. (Or if you’re really good, a short, fast program!)

I propose the line-second.

Take the number of lines in your program (eg, 42 lines) and the runtime (eg 0.096 seconds). Multiply these together to get a score of 4.032 line-seconds.

A smaller score is a shorter, faster program.

Similarly, (for a particular solver), a larger score is a “harder” problem.

  • exocortex
    6·
    1 year ago

    1. I think a more consistent approach would he to not count lines, but filesizes after the code has been minimized with a specific minimizer. I could write everything in one line in many languages, so lines isn’t very clever.

    2. The code has to be compiled and run on a specific architecture and with specific test input (we don’t know if the AoC-example-data is always the same in size or resulting computanional complexity.

    3. The final metric could be: [minified filesize] * [code execution time] * [problem solving time].