"Rewrite the slow bits" only works when you have a solid hot loop that you can rewrite. But what if most of your program is the hot loop? This particular prob

"Rewrite the slow bits" only works when you have a solid hot loop that you can rewrite. But what if most of your program is the hot loop? This particular problem is not particularly numerically oriented. There's nothing he could feed into a external library to speed it up. It is highly algorithmic code, pretty much the worst case for Python.