Huh, well that makes a lot of sense. Three years ago when I was in University practicing for competitive coding we came across a limit in the performance (ms) we could get on even simple problems. The professor leading the practice poked away at his own solution to some problem for days because he couldn't get a better time than the top score online. Eventually he implemented his own versions of cin and cout. Needless to say he was pretty frustrated but there's just some problems that are hard to let go of without a solution.