Awesome! Good to know someone here is not only into Project Euler, but also 
very close to Level 3! I am slowly inching towards Level 2. 
I ran into the same issues with Problem #66 as well; when a 8-core machine 
couldn't handle it, I can stop beating up on my MacBook Air for failing to 
finish :-)
Looking forward to reach the Expert and Legend level on Project Euler with some 
paired-problem solving in the future!
Cheers,

Prakash N Murthy
http://twitter.com/_prakash

--- On Wed, 8/25/10, Gavin Kistner <[email protected]> wrote:

From: Gavin Kistner <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Boulder Ruby Group] Any Project Euler enthusiasts in the area?
To: "Prakash N Murthy" <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, August 25, 2010, 4:39 PM

On Aug 24, 2010, at 11:04 PM, Prakash N Murthy <[email protected]> wrote:
I came across Project Euler recently as a good way to learn Ruby; solving the 
mathematical problems there has been very addictive!
Ran into issues with some of the problems where my brute-force method of 
programmatically analyzing every possible path/option did not work- the program 
ran for more than a day before I lost patience. So was wondering if anyone one 
else in this group has been bitten by this bug before and could suggest some 
alternate approaches to these problems. 
A couple of problems that I have difficulty solving:Problem 12: What is the 
value of the first triangle number to have over five hundred divisors?
Problem 44: Find the smallest pair of pentagonal numbers whose sum and 
difference is pentagonal. I and a coworker here have been fighting the Euler 
fight for several years now (only 13 problems to go for Level 3!) using Ruby. 
Apparently we have solved both of your problems, but unfortunately we didn't 
start keeping copies of the Ruby scripts around until semi-recently. I'll have 
a go at them again with the 'help' of the forum answers and reply to you 
privately if I get something.
FWIW, an embarrassing number of recent 'wins' have been achieved not through 
elegance or insight, but by parallelizing the solution and running 7 copies on 
my 8-core work machine until it finishes. :p Sadly/thankfully, I think we've 
finally hit problems where this order-of-magnitude gain--and our willingness to 
sometimes wait overnight for a solution--are no longer sufficient. For example, 
our latest brute-force attempt at problem #66 ran over the weekend and got 
stuck on step 149/1000.--
(-, /\ \/ / /\/


      
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