The ACM competition

Posted on November 9th, 2003 by Sacha Chua

Judging the 2003 ACM ICPC Manila regionals was tons of fun. Although I
was somewhat delinquent in terms of making problems – I’d only made
one which was simplified due to contest limitations – my problem was
nonetheless included and a few teams actually solved it.

It was a straightforward problem – a text-based database. Helpful
teacher that I was, I made several test cases that checked for
specific errors in program logic, but had to merge them into one
enormous test case for the contest. Coded the solution in 10 to 15
minutes and submitted it via PC^2 for testing. Very glad to see it
work on the first run.

Had some tussles with PC^2 and compiler support. Jerome knew the magic
cmd trick, though, so we managed to get all the compilers to work.

Glad to see the other people from the SEARCC contests. Seemed like
nothing had changed. Mike still crazy-funny self. Chipi still somewhat
insane (but very good). Mars (Gabutz) somewhat less insane (no more
Wendy’s action figures? awww).

Story: It was an hour or so before the contest and Ces still didn’t
have judges’ test data for her problem. General panic. We quickly
prepared 10 copies of a 10×10 matrix for her 3-D problem and started
filling in letters. We finished the test data but weren’t quite sure
if it worked, so I sat down and quickly wrote a solution. Actual
output and expected output differed. Inclined to trust program, so
copied actual output into sample output for initial testing and then
spent some time debugging the test data. (Debugging the test data!
Pfft.) Eventually worked. Felt very pleased when other people solved
the problem, as that confirmed that test data was now correct.

Rejoiced when a team finally solved my problem. Had been on pins and
needles previously as had thought my problem ridiculously easy, thus
lack of attempted solutions was most worrisome. A number of teams
didn’t test with sample output given in problem, tsk tsk.

Went bowling with Dominique, Chipi, Mike, Jerome, and Mars. Non-zero
score. Very happy.

Ateneo still top-ranked Philippine team. Yay. =) Also, they beat more
foreign teams than last year. 5th place, big improvement.

Must work on consistency, though. Last team freaked out and did not
solve any.

More posts about: Uncategorized // 1 Comment »

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/1335

http://www.financialjerk.com/ Finch

Ohhh, the 2003 ACM ICPC! I was here (one of the participants)! Just browsing your old posts… :)

On This Day...

2012: Buying time: Experimenting with scheduling — One of my business validation experiments has suddenly kicked into high gear. People love the sketchnotes I’ve been taking. Since [...]
2011: Thinking about how to get even better at bulk-cooking — We like cooking in bulk. We find it to be an efficient way to make sure we’ve got healthy, [...]
2010: How to use Drush to download and install Drupal modules — One of the best things about building websites with Drupal is that there are thousands of modules that help [...]
2009: Weekly review: Week ending November 8, 2009 — Last week was a high-energy week. Tuesday was networking-intensive: a breakfast meeting, a major presentation, and a speed-mentoring event. On [...]
2008: Weekly review: Week ending November 9, 2008 — This week: Got ready for the second release of my Drupal-based project. Things are going well! Attended the Women in IBM Networking [...]
2007: Other stuff — I like working from home. I set up my work laptop together with my personal laptop as something of a dual [...]
2007: Kaizen: Tweaking my schedule — What’s the best way to spend your day? Today I experimented with my schedule again. Instead of waking up at 6 and [...]
2006: It’s one of those blah days — I stayed up late last night and didn’t feel too well this morning. In fact, I ended up getting out of [...]
2005: Emacs: It’s all about people — Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users quotes Nat Torkington: “It’s no longer aspergers and emacs… we’re putting people back into the equation.” Why [...]
2005: Free and open source programs — Looking for high-quality free and open source programs to help your Microsoft Windows-using friends make the switch? Check out LOOP: [...]
2005: Brilliant idea! — I’m going to make this weekend Planner Documenting weekend. Kinda like the National Novel Writing Month‘s goal of just getting stuff out [...]
2005: Emacs: Not bad, just misunderstood — People love dissing the Emacs text editor. Emacs is one of those arcane things that even _geeks_ aren’t expected to understand. [...]
2004: My timestamping/thumbnailing script — #!/bin/bash while [ -n "$1" ]; do if [ -f $1 ]; then DATE=$(date +"%Y%m%d-%H%M%S" --reference="$1") [...]
2003: Summary of today — Finished the draft of my article for Crossroads. Submitted it already, but haven’t received any confirmation yet. They’ll notify me of acceptance [...]
2003: More emacs coolness – browse apropos — http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/BrowseAproposURL
2003: Free NNTP — http://news.individual.net/ free Usenet (no binaries) Extremely good service, good spam filters
2003: BlueJ and jikes — bluej.compiler.type=jikes bluej.compiler.executable=jikes
2003: BlueJ robot world — http://www.rdv.vslib.cz/skodak/en/bluej/RobotWorld/index.html
2003: New wishlist: The Passionate Teacher — http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0807031437/ref%3Dpd%5Fluc%5Fmri/103-8079128-4290215
2003: BlueJ stats — http://cerg.csse.monash.edu.au/reports/BlueJ_1.htm
2003: Guidelines for BlueJ — - Guideline 1: Objects first. - Guideline 2: Don’t start with a blank screen. - Guideline 3: Read code. - Guideline 4: Use [...]

sacha chua living an awesome life