Got another TopCoder Open t-shirt!
I’ve just managed to get my third TopCoder Open t-shirt in a row! Each year’s Open runs through several phases culminating in a handfull of far better contest programmers than me going to some nifty place to compete for 10’s of thousands of dollars in prizes. Here in the early phases there aren’t thousands of dollars at stake, but everyone that does well enough in the qualifying round to get to Round 1 gets a t-shirt, and I’ve just snagged my third straight shirt :-).
I’m still not doing as well as I’d like, with my few summer performances all being pretty sub-par and gently dropping my overall rating every time. I only just qualified for the Open on Tuesday/Wednesday, being 694 (or some such) with the top 700 going through. This morning’s Round 1 went at least a little better, and I placed 310 out of 670 that competed. (This raised my rating by over 40 points, but given that I dropped nearly 300 since last September, there’s still a ways to go.) The top 400 go on to Round 2, so I get to suffer through this again next Wednesday night. The problem set this time was really mathematical, which tends to work well for me, but I made the 500 point problem a lot harder than it needed to be and lost quite a few points there. I had two successful challenges in the challenge phase (+100 pts to me!), but then also had two unsuccessful challenges (-50 pts to me) for a net +50 in the challenge phase. The first incorrect challenge was a direct effect of my making the 500 point problem harded than it needed to be (I thought you couldn’t do something simple that obviously you can). The other incorrect challenge was to a program that later failed a system test, so I was right to be suspicious but obviously didn’t get the right challenge case.
I made the top 200 that go on to Round 3 once before, but I’m not optimistic that I can scrape off that much cruft this time. We’ll see.
A nerd’s idea of a discussion of fashion: “Hopefully the shirt will be cool. I really dug the shirt two years ago, but last year’s shirt was kinda dumb.” Yeah, OK, that was me talking, but we don’t have to tell anyone, do we?
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