I for one have learnt a lot from this competition and I take my hat off to all the people who kicked my ass. I would also like to thank Jens for putting on the competition; particularly as he doesn't even get to participate!

As for this discussion regarding brute force solutions, don't get too worked up about it guys as after all it's just a friendly competition to inspire ideas for coding. That being said, whilst a brute force solution may be shorter it is not something I would use in a normal script and it doesn't inspire me to use different constructs or approaches to algorithms. Shawn's code is both clever and elegant and gets my vote for the best solution.

Cheers,

Richard von Mallesch