Hmmm, I did try using a PriorityQueue instead of the dictionary, but it was hell to work around the duplicate entries issue, so I gave up. Wish I'd spotted that a SortedSet would give me the same functionality.

This shouldn't pass the tests.

Yes, it works for all but the edge case of just reaching, where the 2 * int + 1 counts that as passing the window, where the floor doesn't. Took me a long time to work out why that was the case :(

replying to Jon - surely the int value of the character is the ASCII value?

M is -- and I is .., so I assume the M/I thing is the next test along failing after the E / T thing.

The instructions were to ignore leading and trailing zeroes. When you do that the time signature for the first one is singular, for the second it's tripled.

I'm sure it's clever, but it's beyond my understanding lol

Thank God someone else came up with the sensible solution. I was beginning to despair looking through these.

Best Of Breed after looking at some of the other solutions?

I didn't know you could pass Char.IsLetter like that, should have guessed since you can in Java. In Java, this is considered better practice, is it the same in C#?

Why do the random tests (in C#, anyway) have negative numbers in the arrays?

I tidied this up (and converted it to C#) and it worked for me, not sure what's wrong when you run it.

I tried to do an int only solution, without stringifying and intifying. Bit of a faff around the factors when the square was double digits. Impractical to fix this using a factor of just 10 ** length(ret), because this becomes a nuisance for the first digit - also you use length, which was against the principle of just using ints.

Longer to work out what to do than to code it up :D

Having said that, I didn't look anything up and I did it in less than an hour. I think people are looking at this and just throwing their hands up and saying that is too complicated.

Here is a page of stars on a screene, can you position and rotate this overlay of stars to match? Might be a simpler way of putting it.

(I just treated the third coordinate as if it were the z-coordinate, I doubt that that is true, but my solution still seems to work.)