16 Jul
2007
16 Jul
'07
4:32 p.m.
Hugh Perkins
Careful. Although writer's solution (the "reference" solution) must run in under 1 second in Java, many problems run really close to the 2-second limit in practice. That means if your language is inherently 30% slower, you may fail the harder problems.
As I said, in my experience with TopCoder (mainly a couple years ago), I never ran into a problem with the time limit. I've run into plenty of problems where I wasn't able to complete the problems due to time limit there. I suspect most others have similar experiences. If you've competed and your programs timed out a lot, you're probably better off with better algorithms than hunting for a faster language. -- Chris Smith