I am a recent arrival to spoj, and am enjoying it very much. However, I'm a little disappointed that the run time limits for some problems prevent one producing a solution in python, simply because python has such slow IO and scanning.
For example, I have a solution to HMRO which takes about 1.5 seconds to run on my laptop (1.6GHz P4M). This is with a dataset that I generate with size as specified on the problem description.
I get TLE on spoj.
I can strip it down so it just scans the input and produces canned output. Then it runs in 1.26 s and gets Wrong Answer (of course) after 4.38s.
So IO takes 4.38s out of the 5s available, and my algorithm, which is O(n) and runs in less than 1s cannot even be tested. I mean, it could be that it produces wrong answers, but I can't even test it.
It is a similar story for CISTFILL.
Yes, C has fast IO, and I would like to have fast IO in python too. But maybe just a little longer time limit would add to the fun while still preventing dumb and lazy O(n!) solutions from passing?