"So:  - half the table was a priori redundant and Charlie's computer worked significant overtime."

It's true that in the first portion of my solution, where I ignored the "ascending magnitude" requirement, that the second part of the table was redundant; however, my for the final table it was not, as that took the "ascending" requirement into consideration.

But also, programming-wise, it was less time and energy to program the full solution straightforwardly, as it didn't matter that the computer run time would be 2 seconds instead of 1 (that being the order of magnitude of the run time). Programming reversals would have taken longer in human time.

Edit: actually it was more like a full second rather than half a second. The programming effort was not worth shaving a half second off the run time.

Edited on January 7, 2012, 10:20 am

Posted by Charlie on 2012-01-07 10:16:33