[Haskell-beginners] GCJ 2015 - Round 1A Problem - Haircut

Doug McIlroy doug at cs.dartmouth.edu
Sat Apr 18 14:29:11 UTC 2015


> Can someone tell me how I could have avoided or fixed this?

The trouble manifested as stack overflow on solving

> https://code.google.com/codejam/contest/4224486/dashboard#s=p1

For efficiency, you'll probably need more cleverness in math than
in Haskell. You can predict an approximate start time for the Nth
customer's service from the average per-customer service time M,
where 1/M = sum 1/M_k.
Starting from that estimate, one can skip over almost the entire
service simulation.

Doug McIlroy


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