For anyone looking to get started in R, I’ve created a fork of the challenge repo in which I’ve added an R-implementation of the benchmark algorithm.
The fork currently only has a single additional file benchmark/benchmark.R which creates a file data/submission.csv for manual submission.
In due course it’d be good to update this to a file main.R which is compliant with the submission process set out in the read me. I’ll get around to this eventually, but welcome others input!