A pleasure sir, it's always worth trying to formulate any constraints until you find a set that can be resolved.

I certainly can't say I understand what this code is doing, it's too opaque for me - I'm just impressed that this few lines of code can solve the problem when I wrote far too many!

Efficient enough to make it into the solutions list is efficient enough though, ain't it? :)

Comments, or just a leading comment explaining the process, would be very useful - great solution.

What an amazing series, needed to add extra optimizations between the 4x4, 6x6, and 7x7 - the latter was a pig. I'm sure there's a lot more code in my solution that is merited, I'll likely revisit at some point and see just how little I can get away with.

Well, that was a challenge and a half. I fear I overthought and overengineered it, and some obvious optimizations were not-so-obvious 'til late in the day - onwards and upwards to 7x7 Skyscrapers... :D

I've amended - the chance of collision was around 2-in-a-million, but yes, it would have likely shown up at some point (and could've confused the poor dev that hit it!).

Hi, I've added in some code to randomize the IDs of the employees, whilst there's a small chance of a collision, I don't know that it's worth worrying about.

I've changed employees_total to be an INT, totally agree that half an employee is no use to anyone. :)

Age is age-as-of-2016-04-01 as I understood it when completing the kata.

Have changed to INT.

Duly noted, thanks Steffan, and my apologies to Cépagrave if I've undervalued your kata - I shall not be doing that again!

Hi Cépagrave - it doesn't appear to be a requirement of approving a kata that the moderator has solved it - I set the ranking based off the power-user average assessed rank, which was 5 kyu. I'm not likely to set the rank on any further katas without solving them as I found that doing so precludes the moderator from accruing honor when they then go on to solve.

I don't think that I should be setting the rank on a kata based on my personal opinion of how difficult it is or isn't, though - I'd much rather rely on a user average than my experience.

If I moderate a beta kata that is pending approval (i.e. set the difficulty), having not already completed that kata, and then go on to complete it, is it the case that I don't then gain the relevant honor for completing it?

I understand if this is indeed the case ('cause theoretically I could've lifted the solution from the kata if I were so inclined) - just interested in knowing this - would mean I would for sure complete the kata prior to editing/approving it if so. :)

Hi B4B - have just completed this, I don't know about you, but I reckon this Kata is good-to-go, I had no trouble interpreting the requirements and coding up a solution - I did have some test failures but that was down to my incompetence... :).

If you reckon on the test cases requiring more clarity, I'd be happy to work on that.

Worked perfectly for me. My solution is rather naive (I could optimize it further if it had timed out... :)) - I reckon this is good to go, I don't reckon it's less than 4kyu.