Q: Under Your Task in bench.txt you say, "...such that the smallest N produces an average run time of at least one second for the slower implementation...". By "run time" do you mean "user time"?
A: Yes.
counterparts.txt I say that Python numeric literals cannot contain underscores but that
is incorrect. I'd swear I'd double-checked that when writing that example but I guess I didn't. It looks like that was added to
Python in 3.6.