So I've vastly overestimated the processing it would take to find domino tilings of a rectangle and wrote up a challenge that has gotten a little weird.
First of all, the execution times are really low. For both answers, execution takes roughly the same time as compilation. The answers (both in C) cannot even turn on compiler optimizations because the increased compilation time actually hurts their scores...
Now, both answers have to work for all rectangles up to 8 x 8 but are currently scored using 8 x 6 rectangles. 8 x 8 takes roughly a second for both answers (with optimizations turned on), so that might help. Doing so would not change the positions in the current leader board.
But there's another problem. The mandatory output is 9 MiB for 8 x 6 and 950 MiB for 8 x 8. Printing the output seems to take up roughly half the execution times for the answers in their current state, and it has been suggested that preparing the output for printing might actually require a lot more time than finding the valid tilings.
I thought requiring the output instead of just counting the tilings was it is was a good way of making sure that there was no blurry line between hardcoding the result and actually calculating it. At the same time, eliminating the output doesn't seem fair to the answerers who spent a considerable amount of time optimizing the output (which wasn't intended to be the point, but still is something that can be scored).
My gut feeling in that its too late to change the output format, but that I should score the submissions using 8 x 8 rectangles. Thoughts?