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...
We’re having our last practice session tonight before the Pacific Northwest Regional competition happening this weekend. Our last few practices have not run as smoothly as I had hoped. After our moderate success in the ACPC competition a few weeks ago (see October 18th post), I had been hoping to try out some new team strategy ideas. However, students have been ill or have had other...
Last night we had our weekly Wednesday night practice session. Based on results from previous competitions, I’ve noticed that typically our top performing team is one problem short of a top tier spot in the contest. Also, in the ACPC competition from last Saturday, UVic White solved 8 problems without any errors, but they had some large gaps between submissions. As a result, we decided to...
The two UVic teams, Vikes White and Blue, participated in the Alberta Collegiate Programming Competition yesterday. The Whites team consisted of Dan Sanders, John Hawthorn, and Scott Porter, while the Blues had students Tim Song, Tristin Sturgess, and Tyler Cadigan. You can see the final scoreboard here. It was a great competition and turn out, 37 teams participated. Vikes White was the top...
Last Saturday, the two UVic teams participated in a practice session with teams from SFU, UBC, and Columbia university. Columbia was first overall with 6 problems solved, and two individuals from UBC also solved 6 to claim second and third. We had a bit of a rough start as some UVic team members were locked out of the building and arrived late. Also, the top UVic team was missing a member and the...
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...
