ACM Programming Competition

The ACM programming competition is an international event, where undergraduate students compete for coding glory, or something like that.

Today I went with my team to the first preliminary round. We didnt get through, but did pretty well (came 5th out of 20 teams from Adelaide, we were ranked 45th in the South Pacific). We did manage to get plenty of free stuff, I got a bag full of Google stuff (I'm wearing the shirt now).

Has anyone else here competed? Thought about it? Never heard of it? If you think you might be interested in it, look it up. I'll be going back next year for sure.

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

What did you do for the competition? Was it a test or your own project?

5 hours locked in a room solving problems in Java. Given 10 problems, we were able to solve 2 (the best team solved 7).

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

Sounds boring. :razz:

Sounds boring. :razz:

It wouldn't be. As long as the problems were interesting.

Wilson, are you able to discuss the problems you were given? If so ... what were they?

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Yeah, I think I can discuss them, they get released after a year anyway. One of the problems was to decode a message encoded by putting it in the diagonals of a matrix, so "yhelothar" becomes:

y h l
e o h
t a r

which is given as "3, yhleohtar", the 3 being the number of columns in the matrix. You have to write a program to decode any given message, with any given number of columns used to encode it. This was one of the easiest problems, I think almost every team figured it out.

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

Ah, too bad my regional compo is in bloody StockHolm.

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:: Forceflow.be :: Nuclear Dawn developer