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, . 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...
Simon Fraser University hosted an ACM Team Qualifier competition this past weekend for UBC, SFU, and UVic students. SFU had 30 students compete, UBC had 21 and UVic had 6. Dan Sanders from UVic finished third, while John Hawthorn, also from UVic, finished 13th. The complete final standings are here: Dan jumped out to an early lead in the competition by solving problem A on the first try, 13...
It’s been quite a while since I posted, but the Pacific Northwest regional competition is coming up in about a month. As a result, beginning last night, I’ve started training UVic undergrads in preparation for the competition. I had all the newbies work on four different simple problems, mostly dealing with string processing. Links to problems: Everyone solved at least one problem and...
I competed on TopCoder last week. I submitted solutions to all three problems, but due to some pretty silly mistakes, only my 500 solution passed the test cases. Pretty shameful :-(. The problem set was actually quite do-able. The first problem was, given a rectangular grid of integers, find the largest square that contains the same digit in all four corners. My solution was to loop through each...
I only read through the problems once and didn’t spend too much time thinking about them, but here’s my analysis based on my first impression. First, check out the problem set here. A. This problem looks reasonably straightforward. Most teams solved it. There’s only 8 planes, so you can try all 8! orderings and use binary search to compute the minimum time. After that, place all...
The ACM ICPC World Programming Finals took place a few days ago on April 21st. St. Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics and Optics was first, Tsinghua University second, and St. Petersburg State University was third. You can check out the full standings here. As usual, Waterloo was Canada’s top competitor, finishing in the medals for the 6th year in a row with six problems solved. I...
I am finally back from my almost month long vacation to Japan and China. The trip was fantastic. It was nice to take a break from programming and work for such a long period, but now I am back and trying to scramble to get caught up. I am teaching a third year course on HCI this summer, so I need to prepare for that. I am also starting as a postdoc in May and doing that until the end of the year...
This is not a very programming related post, but I had my PhD defense today. It went very well. My thesis is being nominated for the University of Victoria Gold Medal, which is the prize for the top PhD thesis at the university. It is probably a long shot as I’m sure there are plenty of good theses out there. Also, I don’t know how any committee could compare a PhD from math with a...
I competed in the Top Coder Open 2009 Round 1 last Saturday after qualifying the previous week. My friends Nick and Oleg also competed. You had to finish in the top 720 to qualify for the next round, but only Oleg managed to do that out of the three of us. I was very close, but unfortunately an off by one error caused me to fail system tests. The first problem was pretty easy. You were given a...
I participated in a TopCoder practice session yesterday with Oleg and a new student in our research group, Nick. It turned out to be my best SRM in quite some time. I think I submitted all three problems before Oleg and Nick had submitted their second solution. I was a little worried that I had messed something up since I finished so quickly. I started looking at my 500 and 1000 point solutions...
