Okay, I'll take a little time to brag. The word count challenge here got my interest at the time, so I whipped up an assembly language version of it and iterated several times, trying to figure out the value of switching different registers. In the end, I took second place:
However, there's an interesting story behind this story. David Stafford, who came in first, posted that he thought he had the fastest solution and bet $100 that nobody could beat it. I posted my code which was significantly faster, and David tweaked it further to eventually win the challenge. Like a true person of honor, he did pay the $100 and I cashed his check.
https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book/blob/4028269f...
However, there's an interesting story behind this story. David Stafford, who came in first, posted that he thought he had the fastest solution and bet $100 that nobody could beat it. I posted my code which was significantly faster, and David tweaked it further to eventually win the challenge. Like a true person of honor, he did pay the $100 and I cashed his check.