ACM UVa runtime

Its been a long time, over 10 years, since I first came to know of ACM UVa and solved 100: 3n +1 problem. Of course, as its easy to recall now, those were the days when I was a novice is programming, even with NCST's MGPTs. (BTW, sadly I didn't know of ACM UVa back when in NCST and struggled much with MGPTs). I am still learning, and will always be, but I've come a long way from then. In this current streak of UVa madness, I solved over 50 problems and didn't just solve it the way I used to earlier. Instead, I focused on bettering the runtime. Solving it is one thing, solving it well is quite another.

Now that the solved numbers are up in a short time, I could also look back and resolve the ones that had taken longer to solve. I decided to check whatever has taken over a second of runtime and see if I could improve those. 3n+1 was one, Cats was another and so was Software CRC too. I knew Cats is a little difficult to revisit now, having solved it only in this streak, so I decided to redo the others. 3n+1 had taken over 3.268s, while Software CRC was timed at 1.391s!! On recoding and resubmitting, the improved timings are 0.052s and 0.082s, respectively. These are pretty satisfying values and the ranking improved, thereby. Someday, I might improve slightly over a sec taken by Cats.

Its been fun and I hope to keep this streak going as long as I can.