I was most surprised to notice -- as pointed out in The golf course looks great, my swing feels good, I like my chances (Part IV) in the
"Which Language Produced the Shortest codegolf Code?" section -- that
the shortest Perl solution in the 1000 Digits of Pi codegolf game of 102 strokes
was far behind both Ruby (54 strokes) and Python (62 strokes).
This is unusual in the extreme because in the other 26 games Perl was consistently
well ahead of Python, yet here was 40 strokes behind! Why?
I'm afraid I don't know because I didn't play that game ... though I bet
"primo" does since he holds the lowest score in all four languages. :)
A wild guess is that Python has native bignums and that is crucial for this game.
The code golf forum for this game
may provide some useful tips. In particular, the Rabinowitz method
was recommended by "hendrik" (see for example this page) -- and hendrik solved this problem
in Python in 67 strokes, just five behind the Python leading pack.
Also, "hallvabo" suggested (if your solution is "close" to the 4 second time limit) submitting your
solution at different times of day because the codegolf server load apparently
varies considerably and your solution only need pass once to be accepted.
