A small programming challenge

[Geoff Canyon]

http://gcanyon.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/less-brutal-insanity/

The last version I banged together in half an hour or so. This one took a little bit longer, and is a much better piece of code. I'm particularly pleased with one of the optimizations I came up with. Sometimes it's important to think not about how to write code that does what you're doing better, but about a better way to do what you want.