Using Python, I was having some trouble getting test case #5 running sufficiently quickly to pass. One of my problems was to do with unnecessarily making the memory use quadratic in the problem size, but that's kind of an algorithm problem. The other is specific to Python, and is a bit subtle so I thought it would be worth describing: although the program can be written without defining a function to do the work (as it only needs to solve one case), accessing file scope variables is slower than function scope variables. Once you've got the algorithm right, this second issue makes a surprising amount of difference to performance.