It looks like a joke to me. The program always just calls exit(0); straight away if the main function is the expected one, which is why it's so fast. All the rest is just noise to hide that. All he seems to be saying is that the competition could be won by implementing fastroot() as just calling exit(0).

Andy Wingo linked this on his blog, with this cryptic title and no elaboration. I read it, but I'm not sure I got it. What's the deal?