I hardly ever give ratings to puzzles, and did not in this case. Ratings are even more subjective and amorphous than difficulty levels, and those are subjective enough. I would not have given the rating as a 1, as I was in fact intrigued by the approximation idea, and how to program for that. Having left the solution for after publication, I was left in a quandary as to which part-1 answer to use.

While some puzzles have explicitly stated no leading zeros, as a general rule I try (as I did in part 1) for solutions without leading zeros unless explicitly stated they're allowed, on the theory that a number such as 5 (the abstract number, not just the representation here) would never be considered a two-digit number, and the implication here was that each number was a 2-digit number. But when no other solution was available, I did mention it in part 2.