Yes :) By a hair of 1ms on the sprint data set (76ms vs 77ms), but by 2x on the long distance marathon data set, compared to the next runner up, who also used

Yes :) By a hair of 1ms on the sprint data set (76ms vs 77ms), but by 2x on the long distance marathon data set, compared to the next runner up, who also used a switching hybrid to enter two types of "runner" in terms of algorithm, but with a single switch point instead of a curve so the sprint algorithm wasn't always used when it should have been, and a slower long distance algorithm that used a more theoretically optimal algorithm but with pointer chasing and more cache misses on real hardware. This was also in JavaScript, on a literal V8 input data string instead of a Node.js buffer, and the thing that really helped was taking time upfront to first recode the string to a buffer. Sounds crazy and slow and unintuitive, but byte operations on a buffer are way faster than charCodeAt() function calls on a string and this more than made up for the upfront recoding. This came the closest to the "null cipher" imaginary competitor I had, close enough within a few percent, of all the prototypes I tried, so I submitted...