Finally a real contest again

Back to some real CS hacking problems... all those card games were making me sick. This problem is a very interesting one. I have been able to pull up several relevent links regarding the min/max # of flips required to sort the stack. In the mathmatical world this problem's alias is prefix reversal. Also a bit of useless information before Bill Gates became the richest man in the world he this problem was the focus of some of his research.

Check out
http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~west/pcol/pcol20.ps

http://www.cut-the-knot.com/SimpleGames/Flipper.shtml

Gates, W. and Papadimitriou, C. "Bounds for Sorting by Prefix Reversal." Discrete Math. 27, 47-57, 1979.

I have yet to dredge up any pseudo code... but the process by which to sort the pancakes can be determined quite easily. So its a big deal to figure out the most effeicent means of doing these calculations, and display the results.

Strange, you don't consider the freecell solver the most intense contest yet?

I thought freecell was definitely intense coding and pretty challenging mathematically. Trying to get a minimum move solution using <32M was tough. And at least no one posted super spoilers for that one!