Argh. I'm a little annoyed by the 3 second time requirement for problem 2 in this week's set. I wrote my solution in Python, and in what should be pretty close to the worst case scenario (10 2 million character strings with no repetition), it runs on my computer in 1.7 seconds. It's failing one of the test cases on time, though. It's hard to tell whether it's my algorithm being inefficient or Python running slowly on their machine.

Well, given the fastest time solutions are really, really fast I'm sure I can improve my algorithm. Back to the drawing board.

EDIT: Ok, I found what was likely making my program run slowly in some situations.

There were certain types of input my program failed on terribly. I rewrote the algorithm and got .62 second (by their measurement) with a Python3 program, so my issue was definitely an algorithm problem and not a language problem. I look forward to talking about the different approaches after the contest.

Using Java, my first attempt was apparently too slow. I then did a minor optimization (about 10%). Since there doesn't seem to be any penalty for multiple attempts (Solomon, is that true?), I re-submitted it anyway, and it worked, with a time of 1.27s. Obviously the data in their input is very different compared to mine if my 10% improvement made such a difference on their input. Is there a way to see the input after a successful submission?

i cant for the life od me figure out whats wrong with my solution to the power sum problem.
heres my code.

I was getting a TLE on test case #2 in Python 3, but got AC in C++