James Miller:
Any tips on where to start?
You have a lot of search space to cover, so before doing a systematic search that requires a lot of time I suggest a quick random sampling of the search space. If there are significantly wide performance inefficiencies you will hit them in less than one hour of tests. Such approach is sometimes missed even by professional engineers :-)
I have already given a link to a game solver that uses associative arrays a lot.
Then, this is my currently "best short solution" of one of the Shootout benchmarks that stresses only hashing. The input data comes from the Fasta benchmark (just use the Python or C++ Fasta code if you want the test data):
http://codepad.org/ZSlrcuad I have few other benchmarks. Bye, bearophile
