September 02, 2006
This afternoon, I served as a judge for the second CompSAt Inter-University Programming Competition (IUPC). The IUPC as an ACM-ICPC-style contest organized by CompSAt that serves as a "warmup" contest for the ACM-ICPC Manila Regional Contest in October, hosted by Ateneo de Manila University. This year, the IUPC was participated by 14 teams from five schools.
Organizer Neill Li asked me to be a judge a few months back and I was glad to oblige. As a battle-hardened veteran of the ICPC (four regionals, two world finals), I figured it was going to be a cinch to come up with two or three problems. But I put off the task until a few days before the contest and to make things worse, solving problems takes only half the effort that it takes to make them. It's tough enough to formulate a challenging problem and then have to solve it to make sure it's solvable. Nevertheless, I was able to get the job done and I was able to come up with three interesting problems:
BTW, the top three finishers in the contest were:
P.S. Can anyone recommend an free online file storage service that'll let me publicly share files? It's sad that I have to resort to using my GeoCities account.
Organizer Neill Li asked me to be a judge a few months back and I was glad to oblige. As a battle-hardened veteran of the ICPC (four regionals, two world finals), I figured it was going to be a cinch to come up with two or three problems. But I put off the task until a few days before the contest and to make things worse, solving problems takes only half the effort that it takes to make them. It's tough enough to formulate a challenging problem and then have to solve it to make sure it's solvable. Nevertheless, I was able to get the job done and I was able to come up with three interesting problems:
- Bored Dots - Inspired by the Flash game Bored Dots, which I got so frustrated with, I made a program to give me the solutions. Not-so-difficult search problem. Just do a brute-force search for the solution. No one in the IUPC was able to solve this but one team did at least try.
- Roman Nvmerals - Determine if a string is a valid Roman numeral or not. It's simple enough to do, and there are many ways to solve it. The most straightforward solution is to write a program to generate the Roman numerals from I to MMMCMXCIX (1 to 3999); that'll give you all the valid Roman numerals and it's easy enough to do a search. Two teams were able to solve the problem.
- l33t H4xX0r5 - Inspired by the l33t esoteric programming language. It looks very hard but really, it's not. The problem statement is just troublesome to read (i.e., discouraging, intimidating) but everything you need to solve the problem is in there. Unsurprisingly, not a single team gave it a try.
BTW, the top three finishers in the contest were:
- De La Salle University (4 problems solved and they were only two in their team!)
- FEU-East Asia College (also 4 problems solved, but slower)
- Ateneo de Manila University (fastest to solve 3 problems)
P.S. Can anyone recommend an free online file storage service that'll let me publicly share files? It's sad that I have to resort to using my GeoCities account.
Labels: Ateneo, CompSAt, contests, IUPC, problem solving, programming
