Sunday, October 16, 2011

ICPC 2011 Where do we stand?

  First of all, sorry that I have not been posting anything lately. Have a lot to share but unfortunately higher priorities coming up!
  So, today was the online selection round of ICPC 2011 for Amritapuri regionals. Now, as the dates for Regionals at Kanpur clashes with that of our end-sem exams, that was ruled out! So, we HAD to perform well to get selected(no option,none at all)! That meant, good hands on practice. But, that was not part of our plans! On past monday I realized the contest was just a week away! Then started frenzied practice sessions!
   Anyways, cut to the contest time. The contest started at 9 am and after 15 or so login attempts, we were finally able to login and see the questions. At first we thought there were 3 easy questions, one medium and one hard. After one "Time LImit Exceeded" submission for problem A we realised that it was actually difficult to solve (eventually only 8 teams all India could solve it!) While Arth was coding the first question, I and Aditya made the algo for problem B and C. The problem B was accepted without any issue and C had one minor glitch. We were so excited after the second submission that we actually screamed "ACCEPTED!" Just 5-6 minutes after that Arth submitted problem D and we again screemed "ACCEPTED!". But, that was the end of all of our screams. We submitted 3 questions at the end of the first hour and then no submission for the next 3 hours!
     After 2.5 hours, me and Adi left all hope of solving problem E and were just sitting there watching Arth try and solve the questions. We ended up being 3rd in our college and somewhere in the 120s or 130s all India. The final result will come on Tuesday. Fingers crossed!
     BTW Shrey Agarwal has shared algorithms for some questions at http://allaboutalgorithms.wordpress.com/