Hey!
Polish Collegiate Team Programming Contest (AMPPZ 2016) took place today, organized by University of Wroclaw. This is my first ACM experience, and I want to share with you my impressions.
To begin with, I'm still a high schooler (2nd grade). However, thanks to generosity of UWroclaw organizers team and some charity institutions, a few best high school teams were able to participate.
Now let's talk about the contest. My teammates were Paweł Burzyński(pawelek1) and Kacper Kluk (wonrzrzeczny). None of us is a really fast coder, so we just decided to focus more on accuracy than speed. As we'll see later, this was kind of a good idea.
The contest started with no delays. I was not expected to be the coding monkey, but somehow it happened that three first and easiest tasks were accepted by me. These were not really challenging, so let's just ignore this fact. Some time later, Kacper scored the "ifologic" problem C. Then, the difficulty has risen.
Meanwhile, teams of UWarsaw1 and 2 were skyrocketing, grabbing quite outstanding scores of 7 problems per 90 minutes and 9 problems after the first half of the contest. After 2,5 hours there were 2 problems with no solves. The problemset was rather on the technical side and at this stage it was only a matter of time who will manage to implement more tasks correctly. As for our team, Paweł scored an interesting F and Kacper was implementing G. B was still unsolved, but we were giving it a try, because it looked like a problem which requires just careful cases handling for which probably most top teams had no time.
There were still two number theory problems left, two graphs, two implementations G and (super awful) B and a something-with-convex-hull-problem E. At that point we had an accuracy of 0 incorrect tries, which gave us a good position even though our solving times was average. Paweł got into E and Kacper finished G, and at 3:15 we had 7 (+20 penalty).
After this, we got quite stuck on harder problems. Because we couldn't solve anything harder, I was chosen to code some clever backtracking for B. A similar problem was already on AMPPZ 2014, named pillars (http://main.edu.pl/en/archive/amppz/2014/fil). While I was adding new and new ideas to the solution, other guys were thinking on EIHL. 30 minutes left, and Paweł sat to code his I solution. Unsurprisingly, it had some bugs. There was little time left, so we had to speed up. We were working together, but I barely knew what the solution should do. We debugged the samples and... WA. 10 minutes before the end, we still had WA and Paweł had basically no ideas what could be wrong. I still don't know how I came up blindly with the right idea, but three mintues later we were happy with the AC. 8 problems with 2 incorrect tries during the whole competition -> that was rather well. At that point we knew we were going to be top10, and we were really satisfied.
After the contest, we had some time to discuss the problems with friends and meet some famous people. We've even managed to have a picture taken with Petr! :)
Then, the solutions presentation and final ceremony took place. The organizers prepared amazing piece of work which simulated the ranking in a really cool way. The final results :
UWarsaw1 (mnbvmar, Marcin_smu, Swistakk) 11.
*Google (Petr, Franken, Kwasnicki) 10.
UWroclaw2 (Lowicki, Syposz, Michalak) 9.
UWarsaw3 (znirzej, tabasz, tribute_to_Ukraine_2022) 8.
*III High School Gdynia (kpw29, pawelek1, wonrzrzeczny) 8.
- means unofficial participation. I'll post the official data (statements, results) as soon as they're published. Right now, you can enjoy live ranking from the first 4 hours of contest at : http://solve.edu.pl/~amppz/chartcode2016/ranking.html.
Our results were really satisfactory. And what about you? How was your first ever ACM contest? I'm not talking about such programming legends as [Bredor] and his http://codeforces.com/blog/entry/45106 ACM story, just average people. I'm writing this mostly for myself to remember this event, but I will appreciate any answers :)
One more thing. I want to thank the organizers for an interesting problemset and a reaaaally cool event. Thank you, and thank all people who contributed to it. Looking forward to seeing you in @amppz2017!
Great post!!! And congratulations for the result.. The data from this contest is going to be public?? The last year the contest was organized by University of Wroclaw and I couldn't find the test data in any site.. Do you know if they were made public??
The problemset was published last year. I don't know about the official tests.
http://amppz.ii.uni.wroc.pl/amppz2015/rozwiazania.html
These are links for solutions (Polish only, probably).
This year it will probably be published as well, maybe tomorrow
Please don't send link to problems to foreign people as there is high probability they will be used on some Russian training.
What do you have against Russians?? Everybody is training on our problems why can't we train on others?? Whats the reason of this russophobia??? Yes, we are winning ICPC for quite a long time but everybody can do the same without discriminating others.
Not sure if you really misunderstood my comment or you are just making fun, but I guess it can be interpreted in wrong way, so I will clarify.
With high probability Snark will get problems with all needed data directly from organizers and use them to conduct a contest, however statements will be publicly available soon, so it's better to not share them here in order to not spoil problems.
Very unconvincing taking into consideration that Snark's contests are unrated and spoilers make no sense... -_-
My first ever ACM contest was in 2000. It was a contest of Mathematics and Mechanics department of St. Petersburg SU. There were five problems, and our team were three freshmen who didn't know much about algorithms, or teamwork for that matter. As a result, each of us took a problem, and we replaced each other at the computer, trying to implement, and later debug, what we thought to be the solutions. You see, a classic example of "don't use that strategy ever again".
In the end, we didn't have a single problem accepted, and so didn't advance to the university contest. My teammates went on to explore other areas, but I was stubborn and joined the algorithms study group.
UWroclaw2 nicknames: koratel, PMichalak, tomsyp.
What a catastrophic performance of my team btw. I promise I will be a good boy and prepare for the next year, because that was just devastating.
My first ACM-like contest was in 1998. It was a high-school team contest. Saratov has so long history of contests and olympiads!
I remember one of the problems and I found that I can offer it to Educational round or even regular. Wait for it!
My first ACM ICPC participation was in 2014. Me and my team were going there just for the lolz, we had 40 hours / week of classes + study at home so there was no time to practice for the competition. Anyway we participated because we like the competition a lot and we expected to qualify for the Latin America Regionals because our sub-region doesn't have strong teams. Well it didn't happen. We choked and got 4th place with mere 3 problems solved.
Then in 2015 we went there just for the lolz again and had a lucky strike in the last 5 minutes of competition, in which we solved a problem and jumped from 4th to 1st place (with 5 problems solved). This gave us motivation, so in the start of 2016 everybody from my team created Codeforces account and we started practicing a lot. This year we got an easy 1st place in our sub-region with a huge lead above the 2nd place, and now we are trying hard to qualify for the World Finals!