Problem 57492. Compute the Tetris sequence

Yeah, pre-allocation was the first thing I did (and it helped cut execution time to about one quarter). After that I spent about two hours profiling the code and trying out different kinds of caching to avoid recomputing binary expansions, but they were all slower than the benchmark code in the end (dictionaries in particular). Same for using bitand, that made things (much) worse.

I may try again, but I'm not seeing any obvious avenues for refinement right now.

Side note: disallowing "if" (to combat cheating?) is a pretty tough restriction.

OK, I removed the restriction on IF. In any case, David found a clever way around that restriction (as well as submitted legitimate solutions.)

You did try the command that I hinted at. I did not compute any binary representations.

Yeah, not being able to used if statements required me to get creative too, doubly so since (in the interest of cutting down running time) I did not want to compute a result needlessly. Turns out that while loops can be used as a sort of poor man's if.

Perhaps I'll try that function again then. I was really surprised that it made the code run (much) slower, I would've thought that it was implemented in some optimized way that would beat hand-coded dec2bin()'s by a handy amount. It might be that I did not use it in the optimal manner.