Can this Google Hurdles code be made to run any faster?

Question

Anyone can play Google Hurdles today. Here is my score: 1.1 second. Is there are way of improving this score and running faster than a second?

http://www.google.com/doodles/hurdles-2012

import java.awt.AWTException;
import java.awt.Robot;
import java.awt.event.KeyEvent;


public class RunOlim {

private volatile static boolean run=true;

public static void main(String[] args) {
    Robot robot = null;


    Thread th = new Thread(new Runnable(){

        @Override
        public void run() {
            try {
                Thread.sleep(10000);
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                e.printStackTrace();
            }finally {
                run=false;
            }

        }

    });
    th.start();

    try {
        robot = new Robot();
    } catch (AWTException e) {

        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    while(run){
        robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_RIGHT);
        robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_RIGHT);

        robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_LEFT);
        robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_LEFT);
    }
}

}

Answer 1

First off, this may not really be an answer to your question. You want to play it fast, but I can tell you how you get a great score. Good enough for showing off, if that's what you're after!

You can vastly improve your score, even on a very slow network. And you could even gain even more (secret) medals.

Just play Hurdles once so it shows your score, then - e.g. using jQuery - have fun with the DOM:

$('#hplogo_sbt').html('0.1');
$('#hplogo_sb').find('.hplogo_smh').removeClass('hplogo_smh').addClass('hplogo_smg');

That's about it, 0.1 seconds and 3 gold medals (you could get up to 9 without breaking the layout if you have a 0.1 second time, just insert more "medal" dom nodes).

Answer 2

There are some general notes about the code, not really performance improvements (however, I have not tested their performance). I guess the real bottleneck could be in the browser/OS/hardware which can't handle more key events.

Anyway, these do not need any other thread:

1. final long endTime = System.nanoTime() 
       + TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS.convert(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
   while (endTime > System.nanoTime()) {
       robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_RIGHT);
       robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_RIGHT);
   
       robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_LEFT);
       robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_LEFT);
   }
   

2. final long endTime = System.nanoTime() 
       + TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS.convert(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
   while (endTime > System.nanoTime()) {
       for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
           robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_RIGHT);
           robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_RIGHT);
   
           robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_LEFT);
           robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_LEFT);
       }
   }
   

Maybe these were your first tries too.

Here is a 3rd one with a ScheduledExecutorService:

public static void main(final String[] args) throws AWTException {

    final ScheduledExecutorService scheduledExecutorService = 
        Executors.newScheduledThreadPool(1);
    final Runnable stopCommand = new Runnable() {
        @Override
        public void run() {
            run = false;
        }
    };
    scheduledExecutorService.schedule(stopCommand, 10, TimeUnit.SECONDS);

    final Robot robot = new Robot();

    while (run) {
        robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_RIGHT);
        robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_RIGHT);

        robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_LEFT);
        robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_LEFT);
    }
    scheduledExecutorService.shutdown();
}

A final note from Clean Code, page 25:

Classes and objects should have noun or noun phrase names like Customer, WikiPage, Account, and AddressParser. [...] A class name should not be a verb.

I'd name it HurdleRunner, for example.