The First Annual UVic Programming Contest took place last Saturday, January 31st, 2009. The contest went extremely smooth. We didn’t have any problems with the PC^2 software and only a few minor issues with the problem set, but everything was caught right away. There were 12 competitors in all. You can check out the problem set, scoreboard, solutions, and judge’s inputs/outputs here...
Last night was the last practice session before the UVic undergraduate programming competition on Saturday. We had a decent turn out of 11 people and I heard from a few people that are coming to the competition but couldn’t make it last night. I’m guessing we’ll have about 15 people on the weekend. I had the students do some old contest problems that Nathan Scott and I wrote...
Since I’ve started competing on TopCoder the lesson of knowing your libraries has been really hammered home for me. I was, of course, never against this, but often I would write my own functions to check alphanumeric values, parse integers and doubles, format output, and so forth. These don’t take that much time to write, but it’s still time away from writing the actual solution...
I did a practice SRM on TopCoder this morning with my friend Oleg. It was SRM 308 Div 2. It went reasonably well, we both got 2 out of 3 accepted. Oleg submitted the 1000 point problem but made a simple mistake by calling the min function rather than max function in one place. I didn’t end up submitting the 1000. Oleg beat me by about 20 points as he finished the second problem faster than...
I posted this week’s problem of the week challenge on the UVic programming club website. You can check it out here if you’re curious. It’s based in part on a problem I did years ago at one of my first contests. It’s not a really challenging problem, although some people may struggle with the parsing and this is in part why I chose this problem. The students main hurdle at...
We had our third week of practice last night. Approximately 10 people were there, so the numbers are staying consistent. I’m hoping that we’ll have about 15 for the competition on the 31st. Ian Bull showed up at the beginning to talk about the Google Summer of Code project. He participated last year and is possibly mentoring this coming summer. We both thought the club members might...
I competed in SRM 433 on TopCoder this morning. It didn’t go all that well. I solved the first problem quickly, although I could have been a little faster. The problem was to minimize an expression S = A1*B1 + A2*B2 + … AN*BN, where A and B are vectors of integers and you can re-order A in anyway you choose. The solution is simple, sort both vectors, one in ascending order and one in...
Through 2003 to 2005 I participated in the ACM ICPC university programming competitions for the University of New Brunswick. I made the world finals in both 2003 and 2005. Participating and training for these competitions are some of my most vivid and fun memories from my undergraduate years. I learned more about algorithms, data structures, language syntax, attention to detail, and problem...
