MikeMirzayanov's blog

By MikeMirzayanov, 7 years ago, translation, In English



Hello all.

This coming February of 2017 will be a new experience for me: I'll be one of the coaches who will teach at the Barcelona ACM-ICPC Bootcamp hosted by Harbour.Space University. In addition, here are some well-known coaches from our community: Endagorion, GlebsHP, Michael, Jacob and snarknews. The camp will be hosted in collaboration with Moscow Workshops ACM ICPC by MIPT. The same proven effective studying techniques will be used at the Barcelona Bootcamp.

For me, it will be the first teaching experience outside of Russia as well as my first trip to Spain. I’ll do my best to coach you how to solve problems in an efficient fashion. Also, it will be an excellent chance to communicate about Codeforces personally with the real users.

Hello Barcelona Programming Bootcamp, in collaboration with Moscow Workshops ACM ICPC, is an opportunity for teams of different levels to prepare for successful participation in ACM ICPC. The Bootcamp will be split in two divisions:

  • Division A. Designed to prepare students to excel and win medals in the next ACM-ICPC World Finals.
  • Division B. Designed to help teams prepare for the next season of ACM ICPC Regionals and international competitions. This is an appropriate introduction for teams and students new to the world of ACM ICPC and competitive programming competitions in general. The Division B curriculum features thematic lectures and contests.

The participation fee is €1270 per person (cultural programme, accommodation and meals included). The location in Europe gives the effect of the rather high cost. Anyway, the event is non-profitable for these reasons: To prepare world-wide teams for ACM-ICPC and to scale Russian expertise of coaching on other countries.

The Bootcamp will start on February 6th and will last for 9 days to February 14th. If your team (or you individually) is interested to take part, please register before December 24th, 2016 by the link (discount 20% for registration in time):

Register
to Barcelona ACM-ICPC Bootcamp

You can ask any questions by email [email protected]

Hope to meet you on the Bootcamp,
MikeMirzayanov

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7 years ago, # |
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Is 1200 per team or per member? Is it possible to participate for non-students?

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    7 years ago, # ^ |
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    "The participation fee is €1270 per person"

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Who is main initiator/organizer of that camp? What is the point of organizing it? I see it has solid teaching staff and it looks like its target is similar to one of Petrozavodsk camp's, but they are significantly overlapping (reminder: Petrozavodsk is scheduled to 30.01-09.02). It is also not the case that we have two disjoint groups of qualified teachers who are competing against each other on who will organize better camp, since organizers sets have lot in common. I am confident problems on Petrozavodsk will be of very high quality and sufficiently high difficulty. I am not that confident about it about that Barcelona camp, however judging from teaching staff it will probably also be like that (if it is meant to be like that). Will there be created different sets of ~9 decent problemsets or will they be exactly the same as on Petro? I would say nobody benefits from splitting group of good teams into two smaller ones.

If this is meant to be "parallel Petrozavodsk" for teams who prefer to have camp in Barcelona then it is OK, but if camps will have different content and they are fighting against each other to gain as many participants as they could I would say it is at least weird. Can somebody involved in organization comment on how does that camp relate to Petrozavodsk camp?

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    7 years ago, # ^ |
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    Hello. I'm sorry for the delay with reply to your question.

    Here are the main differences between Barcelona camp and Petrozavodsk camp:

    • The point. Petrozavodsk is aimed to serve to experienced teams as a die-hard training spot and also a venue to gather the motivated crowd together. Barcelona is organized with a different thing in mind: make an approachable training camp for experienced and novice teams alike.

    • (as implied by the previous item) The difficulty. Petrozavodsk is indeed known for its high-quality and also very hard problems. Teams that are not very experienced in competitive programming usually find it very difficult; in Russia they are usually advised to take part in "mirror" camps (like the Izhevsk camp) that have the same contests with hardest problems replaced by easier ones. It is likely that very few Petrozavodsk-level teams will be able to come to Barcelona (I know only about two MIPT teams and one SPbSU team, but I don't have the full info), but there will be several "divisions" with contests of different levels. The harder divisions will have Petrozavodsk-level contests (probably intersecting with Petrozavodsk). The easier divisions will likely have educational contests with lectures (much like Moscow ACM ICPC workshops).

    • The audience. European countries have a lot of very prominent and renowned universities, yet the majority of them don't seem to be involved in ACM ICPC much, and for no apparent reason too. One large point of Barcelona camp is to provide smooth introduction to ACM ICPC for interested European students and their universities. We hope that novice and intermediate-level teams will find this opportunity to make acquintance with ACM ICPC interesting.

    To sum up: if you're a veteran finalist-level team (such as Warsaw SU), then the choice of the camp for you is mostly a matter of taste (and convenience) rather than the training quality. If you seek to improve your performance at the regional competitions or seek introduction to competitive programming, then we encourage you to visit Barcelona.

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How many people have registered by now? It seems the cost is a bit too high and most students can't afford it.

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MikeMirzayanov Will the trainings and materials be available for all?