The article doesn't actually say that performance was one of the judging criteria, and I'm unable to find anything in the code jam rules about this. Can anyone here clarify?
Performance is not technically a criteria but you have eight minutes from the time you download the input data until you have to be done uploading the output data. So if you spend 50 minutes incrementing integers, then you'll get 0 points no matter what :)
Performance isn't a judging criteria, other than you need to be able to provide the proper output from a given input within a certain number of minutes. For this problem, it had to be within eight minutes.
Not for the qualification rounds, but in later rounds, the winner is the person who gets the most number of points first. It won't come to any surprise that the finals tend to be dominated by C++.
Once you request to download the input data there is only a short (8 minutes IIRC) window of time during which you can upload your output data. Therefore your program must run within that time period.
