ACM Programming Contest Results

An anonymous submitter writes: "Shanghai Jiao Tong University has won the 2002 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest with six of nine problems solved. Also solving six problems were MIT (2nd), University of Waterloo (3rd), Tsinghua University (4th), and Stanford University (5th). You can view the problems online, as well as the final standings. Congratulations to all!"

Comments

*woooooosh*

[term0r]

Thats the sound of those questions flying past way above my head...

Re:*woooooosh*

[csbruce]

Too bad my university doesn't do the same for the various theory courses we have.

Prove that P=NP. Ten points. Plus Turing Award.

Re:pdf to html

[sinserve]

The proof that you can't teach "common sense" in a CS class.
Here we have Adobe, a very successful software company, with
some of the finest minds in its arsenal.

Adobe's "engineers" did not think that it would be a good idea
to cache the pdf files they translate. So, now we have hits of
slashdot proportions, all demanding an on the fly pdf2html translation
of the SAME file, and dobe does every translation on its own, thus
reverse slashdotting the original site, costing itself CPU cycles/memory,
and costing us time!

What is so hard about a file-URL and a creation time-stamp key, that
hashes into an HTML file in an PDF2HTML database?

I know this is off-topic, but you would think Adobe would know about
common sense coding .. oh wait, this must have been done by their
cryptography department ;-D

P.S. this would never have happened if they released the PDF specs, or dumped
the conversion tool in some public site (e.g. simtel)

--

You can use lisp too

[toomim]

You can, actually, use scheme as well as Java and C/C++.

Just make one person memorize the code for a scheme interpreter beforehand. Have him type it in at the beginning of the test (while the other students think about the problems), and voila -- your whole team suddenly becomes a couple-hundred IQ points smarter.

You just have to get used to writing scheme code embedded inside of a gigantic string constant...

My contest story

[Reality Master 101]

When I was a sophomore(?) in high school around 1980, some friends and I entered a programming contest. I don't remember which one it was; it may even have been an ACM contest.

Anyway, we got a bunch of problems. I ended up taking the hardest one, which would probably take all the time allotted, while the others worked on cranking out the simpler one.

Here was the question: You have a salesman that must travel through a series of cities. Write a program to find the shortest route.

I had never heard of the Travelling Salesman problem before.

So I diligently tried to solve the problem. But for some strange reason, I kept running into cases that made it difficult to find the optimal, shortest route. I worked my ass off for the 2 or 3 hours that we had, and ended up running out time. I was sure there "had to be a solution", otherwise, why would they give us the problem?

It wasn't f***ing fair, and I'm still f***ing pissed about it to this day. :)