Python Programming Contest

[Raymond Hettinger]

[Brian Quinlan]
> I'm doing to judge the solutions based on execution speed. It sucks but
> that is the easiest important consideration to objectively measure.
 . . .
> I'm always looking for feedback, so let me know what you think or if you
> have any ideas for future problems.

I'm curious about the stability of your timing setup.  If you run your
own version of fly.py several times with the same starting seed, how
much variation do you see between runs?

When I tried the provided setup, it was highly variable.  To get useful
measurements, I needed another timing framework:



import timeit

setup = """
import fly_test
import random

from fly import fly
random.seed(1234567891)
params = []
for i in xrange(100):
    schedule = fly_test.generate_schedule()
    from_, to = fly_test.pick_cities(schedule)
    params.append( (from_, to, schedule) )
"""

stmt = """
for p in params:
    fly(*p)
"""

print min(timeit.Timer(stmt, setup).repeat(5, 3))