HHC 2017 RPL Programming contest information and results thread

[David Hayden]

I didn't enter the contest but started looking at it last night. The scores of the entries received differed enormously which led me to ask "when should you stop adding denominators?"

Suppose you have a program of b bytes that generates a score of S. Will adding new denominator d to one of the answers increase or decrease your score. If my math is right, the new denominator will decrease your score if d^2 < 10^9/b. For an 80 byte program that's 3535.

So although the directions say that you should match the input decimal as closely as you can, the scoring favors fewer terms over higher accuracy.