No Whole Food Adventures this week, frankly, Catherine and I ate out most days this last week because we just couldn't be bothered. We've began moving across town to WSU's Family & Graduate Housing, which has a slightly higher base cost per month, but we aren't paying for Cable or Electrical, so we're going to save money overall. Still, it's been a ton of work, and I'm pretty glad it's almost over.

Luckily, the big move didn't preclude me from competing in Google's Code Jam this weekend. Unfortunately, I messed up, and won't be continuing in the competition this year.

Round 1A, on Friday, I could have continued, but I was working on Problem B for an hour, and decided to jump ship to problem C for the last 40 minutes. Unfortunately, Problem C, which was the grab the three digits to the left of the decimal point for the following equation (3 + sqrt(5))^n for any value of n, was impossible to solve using Python's standard precision doubles. Unfortunately, I don't think that Python has a high-precision math library. At least, I couldn't find one. The real irony, at least to me, was that had I implemented this in C on my 64-bit system, the doubles there may have been precise enough, at least for the small set. There were some interesting matrix-based solutions, but regrettably, my knowledge of number theory isn't good enough to make sense of what they were doing.

Round 1B, on Saturday, involved problems that my tired body and sleep-deprived mind, couldn't solve in a timely fashion. At least in Python. Maybe I should have been working in Perl, or C for some of these problems. Oh well, I'll be practicing, and studying up on problems for next Year's Code Jam.