Friday, October 27, 2006

2006 ACM - ICPC Asia - Manila



The contest proper started at around 12:00pm in the afternoon. Our team started solving the "easy" or "five-minute" problems first since that would most probably give us a great chance at solving anything at all.

We solved the Gaussian Primes problem within the first hour. The crappiest thing is that we did not pass our solution, and skipped that problem because we thought that the solution was wrong. Very dumb indeed. I suppose this is the bring down factor that affected out perfomance throughout the competition. We proceeded to another problem called AGTC, which was basically a longest common subsequence problem. The best part of that is that the code for the LCS in our notebook was very buggy. So I ended up using a lot of our time copying the code but not being able to utilize it. Damn. XD We tried another problem, I forgot the name, but it was, again, basically a minimum cost spanning tree. The code in out notebook, again, was not very friendly. Those are the moments when memorization or, at the very least, familiarization of codes or concepts, is essential. It was about 4:30pm when I finally decided to have our team focus on a single problem, which was the Gaussian Primes problem. We successfully solved and passed it, but too late. We also tried solving the Nuevo Romano problem, which is basically a parsing problem made because the computer is too dumb to recognize, and add roman numerals. XD

I was the main programmer and "captain" of our team. I guess my unwise judgment and the team's lack of experience made us get, if I remember correctly, the rank 39 out of 82 teams. XD

Anyhow, we did have that one hundred percent factor, since the only solution that we submitted was correct. XD

We also enjoyed most of everything regarding the competition. The preparation, the travelling, the food, the places, the problems, the contest, the slack times, etc.

The contest is finished. It took a good two-week part in my life. Great experience.

More pics here