Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers!

I shortened the summary of the problem. The full description mentions a list of pairs of numbers, and you accept the list as input. So you write the program without knowing exactly what the input is. (Otherwise, I suppose, you could just calculate the numbers yourself and submit a big static array as your "program"...)

I'd be interested to know more about these different patterns in logic... Are they based on language differences? Cultural differences?