Category: Events

In a surprise bout of competence, mostly brought on by a fairly math-y set of problems and fairly good focus, I managed to be one of the 200 to advance to Round 3 of the Top Coder Open! Huzzah! I even placed third in my room, earning a whopping (but appreciated) $50 to add to my t-shirt.

The problems were indeed quite math-y, which is definitely better for me than the big dynamic programming search problems, where I tend to get bogged down in the details and spend forever debugging. I was pretty fast on the 250 point problem, although I got a little bogged down initially because I missed some important details on my first reading. I wasn’t so fast on the second problem, but not a lot slower than other people, and mine survived the challenges and system tests where many didn’t. After all that, though, I really didn’t have any time to work on the third problem, which is too bad because it looked interesting.

In the challenge phase I found a solution to the 250 problem that I knew was wrong, but I just couldn’t find a counter example that I was comfortable throwing at it. It later failed the system tests, so I was on the right track, but time ran out on me. Arghhh. The stinker is that if I’d correctly challenged it the additional 50 points would have made me second in my room, earning me $75 instead of $50. Such are the vagaries of competition.

In the end I actually placed 109th out of the 364 that turned up tonight, which is a lot better than I would have ever guessed. This good showing jumped my rating by 127 points putting me nicely back in yellow after my summer visit to blue. Happy, happy…

Sadly, I may not be able to compete in Round 3 despite qualifying. Next Wednesday evening is our opening First Year Seminar convocation is at 7pm, and competition starts at 8:30pm. If the speaker (Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco – cool) is on the short side I might be able to dash over and compete, but if it’s a long one or there’s a good discussion afterwards then I’ll have to skip the competition. It’s hardly the end of the world, though, as there’s precious little chance that I’d make it to Round 4, and FYS is definitely the priority if there is indeed a conflict.

Now I need to go back to course prep.
Classes don’t really start Monday… Classes don’t really start Monday…
Classes don’t really start Monday… Classes don’t really start Monday…
Classes don’t really start Monday… Classes don’t really start Monday…
Classes don’t really start Monday… Classes don’t really start Monday…

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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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