2009 Pacific Northwest Regional Programming Competition

The 2009 Pacific Northwest Regional Programming Competition happened this past Saturday. The Pacific Northwest region consists of teams from universities in BC, Washington State, Oregon, Hawaii, and northern California. Approximately 80 teams took part this past weekend.

We left Friday afternoon to travel to Vancouver in a van that I rented. I felt a bit like a soccer mom, taking her 6 kids to a big tournament :-). We stayed at a hostel in a rather sketchy section of Granville Street. After a nice dinner and a horrible night of sleep, we were up at 7am Saturday morning to drive over to UBC for team registration. Everyone was tired and to make matters worse, the competition was delayed an hour.

I was extremely worried about our second team, Vikes Blue, because during the practice competition they were struggling with some basic input and output issues. Going into the competition, I had hoped that Vikes White would finish in the top 10 and the Blues would be in the top half. Both teams far exceeded my expectations and completely blew me away with their performances under pressure.

UVic’s top team, Vikes White, consisting of second year students John Hawthorn, Scott Porter, and Dan Sanders finished 4th with 7 problems solved behind two teams from Stanford University and the winning team from UBC. The second UVic team, Vikes Blue, consisting of Tyler Cadigan, Tim Song, and Tristin Sturgess, finished 22nd with 5 problems solved. The final scoreboard is available here: http://130.86.76.240/pacnw09s/

This is only UVic’s second time competing in the regional competition in recent years and only one student had competed before. The Whites were in 4th place after 30 minutes with two problems solved, however, quickly fell to 9th as other teams solved their 3rd and 4th problem. The Whites caught up by solving 3 more problems, and were tied with several teams in the top 10 with 5 problems solved by the 2 hour mark. At the half way point in the competition, UBC and Stanford were on top with 7 problems solved and all other teams had 5 or less.

Around this time, I could see my team high fiving and I got excited that perhaps they had submitted another problem. I kept hitting refresh on the scoreboard, but no submissions came up. I tried to look at their screen to see if they were submitting, but all I could see was Dan still working away. Shortly afterwards, they submitted.

The coaches receive the problem set at the start of the competition, and after reading through the problems, all the coaches agreed that problem D was by far the hardest problem. This problem involved computing reflections of a laser through multiple crystals. It was the only problem I really had no idea how to solve.

After the Whites submitted, the problem that came up on the scoreboard as under judgement was this very problem and I got extremely worried. I couldn’t believe they were attempting D when several other easier problems still existed. The coach from SFU actually asked me, “Are your guys really gifted at geometry?” I replied by saying, “They’re ok.” They had never successfully solved a hard geometry problem in the past.

I kept refreshing like mad to see what the judgement was, but before the scoreboard updated, I saw my guys high fiving again and I knew they must have received an accepted on it. The scoreboard updated and they moved into 4th place behind two Stanford teams and UBC. I couldn’t believe, I was blown away. At this point, they really had a chance to make the finals.

However, during the next hour and a half, the team failed to submit anything and SFU, U. of Washington and Berkeley all caught up by solving 6 problems. The Whites were still on top of this heap as they had received zero penalty minutes. I knew they would most likely need a 7th or possibly 8th problem in order to keep their position.

The scoreboard froze with one hour to go and during that time, unknown to the Whites and me, two teams from the University of Washington solved a 7th problem and moved into 4th and 5th. The Whites struggled to get a 7th problem and I watched anxiously from the coaches room. I could see them switching between Dan and John at the terminal and I was worried that they were trying to do too much. However, with 5 minutes left in the competition, I saw them high fiving again, and I knew they had solved a 7th. John moved onto the terminal immediately and was working away. He submitted in the last minute, but received a TLE.

We knew the team would probably be in the top 5, but they needed to be 4th behind the two Stanford teams and UBC in order to have a chance for the finals. After dinner they announced the top 7 positions, and UVic had indeed moved into 4th. They have a chance for a wild card position in the finals, but we won’t find out until probably the end of the month.

They were very close on two other problems, and were one of only two teams in the top 10 to receive no penalties for wrong answers. They had accidentally typed in one of the input cases for B incorrectly and spent a long time debugging something that wasn’t actually a bug in their solution. This cost them considerable time. They had solved G, but ran out of time to complete the implementation, which would have took them to 9 problems solved. This would not have changed their overall position with regards to consideration for the world finals. Luckily this lesson didn’t cost them too badly and they’ll hopefully not make the same mistake again.

I was extremely proud and ecstatic with both teams performance. I couldn’t believe they both did so well. I knew they were capable, but you never know how things will go and our practices of late have not been as smooth as I had hoped. Both teams worked extremely well together and I hope we get the opportunity to go to the finals. I’ve already started planning our practices to get better at some of the team’s weak areas.