For anyone that actually reads this blog (yes, there is a handful), you may have noticed some changes. I decided to do a pseudo “re-branding” since I am now going to include posts about my latest academic work, and not just posts related to programming contests. As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve now been at Stanford for almost two weeks. One of the projects I am involved in...
It’s been a few weeks, but my time at the University of Victoria has come to a close. Last Fall I accepted a job at Stanford University, which started February 8th. I’ve been in California, working in the Center for Biomedical Informatics Research Group for about a week and a half. I plan to stay somewhat involved with the UVic programming teams. John Hawthorn and Tyler Cadigan have...
The BC Winter Programming Contest took place this past weekend, January 16th. You can check out the scoreboard here. It was an excellent competition, only one student, Jaehyun Park from Stanford, solved all 7 problems, and almost all students solved at least one. Brad Bart from SFU did most of the work to write problems, solutions, and organize everything. Sonny Chan (coach of Stanford) and...
The BC Winter Programming Contest is coming up this Saturday, January 16th. I’ve been making the rounds to different classrooms, trying to encourage some new students to give it a try. Last night I held a three hour practice session and luckily a few new faces showed up to give it a go. I picked five problems from the 2009 Greater New York Regional programming contest. I picked this set as...
It’s been a couple of weeks since my last post as there’s been less going on with the programming teams lately due to exams. This post is about how to run your own programming contest, but first, I thought I should mention that all the UVic team members were recognized and awarded Outstanding Leadership Awards last night at the computer science department Christmas party...
I sometimes get questions from people asking me about how to get into competition programming, how to practice, how to use the various problem archive websites and so forth, so I thought I’d write a blog explaining how it all works. Most of the practice and competition sites out there have very good guides for this very thing, so this post will mostly give a short description of your...
A lot of problems in the ACM and TopCoder competitions can be solved using a general search technique like breadth-first search (BFS). Many BFS type problems are represented with an initial grid and you want to determine whether you can achieve a certain state or grid configuration, possibly in the minimum number of moves. These problems are very popular and can vary in complexity, however, the...
I received confirmation last night that we did not make the 2010 programming finals. The Pacific Northwest region only received two spots this year, instead of the three it received the last two years. Only one region in North America, East Central NA, received three spots. That region had over 100 teams, while our region only had 82. Also, the top four teams solved all 8 problems, whereas UVic...
The UVic programming teams have recently been receiving some media coverage. Saanich News did an article on the guys and UVic released a small media tip about our performance at the Pacific Northwest regional competition a few weeks ago. Also, at our last practice, A Channel News came and filmed some of the session as well as interviewed myself and some of the guys on the team. They put together...
Still no word on whether the UVic Whites have made the 2010 ACM ICPC world programming finals in Harbin, China, but we’re going to forge ahead with practices as if we have made it. Based on everything I could research, we have a very good chance. In the last two years, there’s been 100 teams at the finals, and both times there’s been three from the Pacific Northwest region. UBC^...
