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in reply to Re: Dueling Flamingos: The Story of the Fonality Christmas Golf Challenge
in thread Dueling Flamingos: The Story of the Fonality Christmas Golf Challenge

I've managed to reduce the Hospelian Arabic to Roman Transform by one byte
You can't just say that so casually! This is the legend, Ton "the alien" Hospel we are talking about, the greatest golfer of his generation!

Peering at your new "32e$&"%72726 concoction brings fond memories flooding back, reminding me of a short Perl roman-to-decimal magic formula ("1E@-"%9995) and some similar ones I stumbled on in PHP (e.g. "5E$c"*1%4999) all those years ago. Of all the aspects of golf, I find magic formulae the most fascinating.

Though retired from golf nowadays, thospel and mtve occasionally visit here, so I'll attempt to contact them, in case they wish to comment on your brilliant new formula. Oh, and you might be interested in this Jan 2007 email thread where ton ponders how his winning score in this game might be beaten.

I have long admired your many and varied golfing exploits: leading 1000 digits of pi in all four languages (Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP) ... then soundly defeating the hitherto unbeatable PHP golfing maestro ToastyX ... and now this. I stand humbled, ô Great Primo.

Update: primo's improvement demonstrates that, instead of whining, it was possible to beat Ton in this game, as thospel pointed out at the time:

No actually. There was a second way of winning: make up your own secret. Nothing stops anyone from thinking of the magic formula for himself. It's also perfectly possible there is an even better way to go from number to roman that nobody discovered yet.