After an entire morning wrestling with bugs and performance issues all around, the evening brought progress in the form of successfully running
dna2rna and
rna2ppm on the prefix provided in the contest specifications. This would not have been possible without an
execution trace of the Endo
Shortly after getting the prefix provided by the spec working, we got one step farther and uncovered another image that will allow us to continue on. However, our implementations give us estimated times that exceed the competition deadline, so we'll be working today to tune them as much as possible. That means we'll be having fun with ruby-prof and scratching our heads thinking of better algorithms.
I did manage to cut our image rendering time down significantly through some memory-eating optimizations, but it may need to be tuned more before it is ready for real loads.
Anyway, I think any more information than that would be spoilers. We're now on the scoreboard and tied with everyone from position 21 on down (and possibly more, they hide the top 20 scores). Our current rank (team: Side-Effects) is #80. Much better than
last year.
