It was disgusting for me to answer on the first question about the simple iteration in Python, because I know the content of the hint by heart but how slow is unknown for me script language on some unknown hardware? My answer was 1M because in the one second of running an empty loop there is going to be some time for compilation of the code or we are just testing the speed of cache. We anyway are going to test the compiler's smartness than anything else. The "real" answer is 103M.