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Comment by asah | Hacker News Reader

You guys are picking on the problem statement. Here's a revised prompt, which also skips the silliness of single threading:

   Write __fully parallelized__ Python code to solve this problem: __Generate__ 1 million random integers between 1 and 10,000,000, find the difference between the smallest and the largest numbers whose digits sum up to 30.

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Correct, this optimization no longer works when you change the problem.

something something moving goal posts

Whose digits sum up to 30, or the sum of whose digits equal 30?

Btw, _whose_ digits are we talking about?

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I just built a random program generator. After I finish optimizing, I'm gonna test it to see if works!

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"If builders built houses the way programmers build programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization"

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gerald_Weinberg

> Btw, _whose_ digits are we talking about?

You seem to be under the impression that whose is not a form of which, which is incorrect.

whose:which::whose:who

The sum of the digits of which equals 30.

Are you sure you don't mean "The digits of which sum to 30"?

There being one legal way to say something isn't evidence that other ways are illegal. It remains the case that whose bears the same relation to which that it does to who.

But what's interesting about this is that there's a tradeoff in the total computation performed by the "fully parallelized" version of this and a sequential one. Without the user knowing this, it's kind of impossible to get the optimization you want: Do you want a minimum work solution or a minimum wall-clock-time solution?

If you want a better fully parallelized one, you do this:

Repeat a few times in exponential progression on k:

Process, in parallel, the first k entries in the list (let's start with 1000). Find the min and max whose digit sums = 30.

In parallel, filter the remaining list to eliminate entries that would not improve upon the min/max thus found.

k *= 10 and repeat until done.

I would wager against the LLM identifying this solution without prompting from the user (or reading this comment).

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