We had our first organized team practice session last night. I had Dan, Scott, and John work on problems from the University of Waterloo’s local contest from September 27th, 2009, http://plg1.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~acm00/090927. while Tristan and Tim worked on four different problems requiring bruteforce solutions.
Dan, Scott, and John struggled a bit on the Waterloo problems. This was partly due to initially using an incorrect approach to a reasonably easy problem. The problem set consisted of 5 problems, two of which were quite straightforward, and two which were solvable but required careful implementation, and the 5th problem I am still unsure how to solve.
With Tristan and Tim, after explaining different bruteforce approaches such as backtracking, enumerating permutations, and so forth, along with how to determine whether a problem can be bruteforced, they solved all four problems that I gave them. The only problem they had was a time limit exceeded on their first problem, which was actually due to Java’s slow Scanner object creation rather than an incorrect algorithm implementation. They were able to get around the issue by modifying the way they read in their input.
Both teams are competing in a practice competition this coming Saturday along with teams from SFU, UBC, and Columbia.
