Someone improved my code by 40,832,277,770%

YES, the improvement should be 40,832,277,770%, not what I say in the video. The "408,322,778" multiple was correct and I did the percentage the wrong way. There will not be a follow-up video to correct that.

This is the reverse-frequency alphabet. Which is frequency in words, not in use (which would allow for frequency of word use; this list counts each word once).
QXJZVFWBKGPMHDCYTLNUROISEA

And whynot, a whole bunch of code. All of it is better than mine. All of it. (Even if you ran it all sequentially.)

Benjamin Paassen [bpaassen]
Sylvester Hesp [oisyn]
Phire [phire]
Neil Coffey [neilcoffey]
Richard Ebeling [He3lixxx]
Phillip Alday [palday]
Diggory Blake [Diggsey]
Orson Peters [orlp]
Bryan Redd [ae6nr]
Pablo Yaggi [pyaggi]
Leonardo Taglialegne [miniBill]
Nathan Baulch [NathanBaulch]
Stefan Pochmann [pochmann]
Jacob [encody]
Gé Weijers [gweijers]
David A. Dalrymple [davidad]
Alex Recuenco [recuenco_alex]
Kristin Paget [KristinPaget]
Ilya Nikolaevsky [IlyaNikolaevsky]

CORRECTIONS
- Ha, I got the percentage around the wrong way. Should be 40,832,277,770% better.
- Yes, I missed the binary digit for the "A" in "BREAD" and everyone in the live premier chat noticed. Sorry about that. 🍞
- Let me know if you spot any other mistakes!

Filming and editing by Alex Genn-Bash
Some graphics by Benjamin Paaßen
Written and performed by Matt "32 days later" Parker
Music by Howard Carter
Design by Simon Wright and Adam Robinson

[stew]

Thank you for proposing the challenge Matt! It's been fun! The solution by Landon and myself referenced at the end truly was an effort that involved everyone else already mentioned in some way.

That 500us mentioned (currently at 300us now by the way) has its "DNA" from about 10 different people in it.
For me, this was as much of a social exercise as it was a mathematical and programming one.

Can't wait for the next challenge!

[elbiggus]

Coder: spends a month writing code to complete a task in a millisecond.
Parker: just runs code for a month.
Result: a tie!

[SavageGreywolf]

I like how this is basically a speedrun category now

[ezrakirkpatrick]

As a programmer, there is nothing more emotionally conflicting than when someone appreciates your code wanting to make it better and then humiliating you by optimizing it to ridiculous proportions

[Forrestorm]

The way to get answers on the internet is not to ask for answers, it's to provide the wrong answer and wait for people to correct you.

[stevemonkey]

The smallest length of time that it is possible to run that code in, shall in the future be called Parker Time

[dirkjensen]

Hands down best part of all of this is finding that Matt's definition of "efficient enough" is just < lifetime of the universe

[hatman]

Btw, this should be a series. Come up with a problem, solve it inefficently, post it to the channel, and run a speed run competition to see who can do it better. That seems like a fun way to learn programming.

[biomorphic]

Let's be honest, the record here is that he wrote a program that took 20 days to run. That wasn't easy, not even in Python!

[jxh]

Seeing the 4, 000, 000% I immediately thought, "Typical exaggeration. Oh, Stand-Up Maths. It'll be an understatement."

[joaovaz]

"You can save days and days of hard work by just spending a few hours reviewing the pre-existing literature" is Matt's way of saying "just read the docs"

[Drawoon]

It still baffles me that you were alright with it running for a month. I'd let it run for a few hours tops before I gave up or tried to improve it.

[HelgeHolm]

The moral of the story is: No matter how hard you optimize, you can't get to the answer faster than Matt because he already finished. :)

[andriypredmyrskyy]

Half my job is "researching the preexisting literature", only to find there was one paper you didn't notice that did what you were doing faster, better, and earlier.

[davideekstok]

Remeber kids:
No matter who you are,
no matter what you do,
there's someone on the internet
better than you.

[Psyched_Crow]

This is the craziest Tool Assisted Speedrun progression I've ever seen.

[NathanHedglin]

As a software engineer, I appreciate your humility. Code, given enough time, can be optimized quite a lot.

[DoctorDon]

I remember someone once telling me that "if you problem is hard enough, you eventually stop trying to compute a solution and you compute how long it takes to obtain a solution." The last time I did that I concluded that my code would run for 12 days. Mentally, I thought, "That gives me 12 days to think of a better approach." By the next morning I thought of a different algorithm that was successful in about 0.1s!

[broadleyn]

And yet none of that hyper-efficient code would likely exist today... if not for Matt. The catalyst. The inspiration. The legend.

[Jack-lrdn]

Watching the cascade from python to java to c++ to c was so satisfying.