From: "Eric I." <rubytraining@...>
Date: 2007-11-19T15:15:03+09:00
Subject: Re: Goedel (#147)

On Nov 18, 10:26 pm, James Edward Gray II <ja...@grayproductions.net>
wrote:
> On Nov 18, 2007, at 7:40 PM, Eric I. wrote:
>
> > I wanted to make an effort at runtime efficiency.
>
> Clever stuff.  Did you benchmark this against any other approaches?  
> I would love to know what kind of an improvement you achieved.

I was curious about this too.  So I ran the five solutions submitted
so far back to back on decoding (not encoding).  The plain text is the
following quote from Einstein consisting of 329 characters.  I wanted
it to be somewhat long to highlight speed differences, and 329
characters is really not all that big.  And Einstein and Goedel were
good friends when they both worked at Princeton.  Here's the quote;
note the embedded newlines:

  The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity
  has its own\nreason for existing. One cannot help but be in
  awe when he\ncontemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life,
  of the marvelous\nstructure of reality. It is enough if one
  tries merely to comprehend a\nlittle of this mystery every
  day. Never lose a holy curiosity.\n

Encoded, it's an 87,418 digit base 10 number.

I had to adjust some others' solutions minimally.  For example, I had
to expand the list of primes that Justin Ethier's solution used, and I
had to put the encoded message in one of his blocks before submitting
it to his decode routine.

Here are the times I got in seconds:

Eric I:      .  3.485
James Koppel:  11.779
Justin Either: 11.868
Eric Lavigne:  19.390
steve:         20.982

So it would appear that the complexity of my process pays off in
time.  Of course, everything is a tradeoff.  I went for speed.  Others
aimed for alternate worthwhile goals, such as easy to understand code,
succinct code, and/or highly Rubyesque code.

Eric