Hi, while submitting 1535F - String Distance for the previous educational round I did observe a strange behaviour. I submitted the absolutely same code several times:

As you can see, submitting with C++17 was AC every single time. Submitting with C++17 (64bit) lead to timeouts on different testcases, like 18, 27 or 32 but also to several AC with all testcases 18,27,32 only needing <300ms in 64bit. I read my code about 20 times now checking for out of bounds errors or stupid mistakes. I have no random numbers generated. I also did several tests by generating a big number of random testcases with both 64bit and 32bit locally, but I couldn't reproduce this behaviour. I got consistent times all around. Now I'm clueless and want to ask whether someone has an idea why this happens.

• AC 32bit: 118502792

• AC 64bit: 118503021

• TLE Testcase 18 64bit: 118502885

• TLE Testcase 27 64bit: 118502935

• TLE Testcase 36 64bit: 118502831

    // check widthwise
    sort(strs.begin(), strs.end());
    for(string const& str : strs)
    {
        for(int i = 0; i < ssize; i++)
        {
            for(int j = i + 1; j < ssize; j++)
            {
                string temp = str;
                sort(temp.begin() + i, temp.begin() + j + 1);
                if(temp[i] != str[i])
                {
                    if(temp[j] != str[j])
                    {
                        if(binary_search(strs.begin(), strs.end(), temp))
                        {
                            ansWidthwisePairs -= 2;
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }

Thank you for your help!