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Internet Problem Solving Contest 2004

Posted by simoniker on from the looking-quizzical dept.

misof writes "The sixth year of the annual Internet Problem Solving Contest (IPSC) will take place on Friday May 21st. IPSC is one of world's largest online programming contests with over 600 teams from more than 50 countries participating last year. The main purpose of IPSC is to compare problem solving skills of people from around the world and, of course, to have fun. IPSC is not oriented on a specific programming language instead you are given the input data and may produce the output data by any means. (This could actually be THE way to show your friends the superiority of both your skills and your favourite programming environment!) The contest is open for everybody and we invite you to participate!"

4 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Problem Solving Skills by xyote · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There's lots of different types of problem solving skills. Some are innate. Some are learned. And practice makes a big difference. What remains to be seen is whether there is any definitive correspondence between "slam" problem solving and real life significant accomplishments. There could be other more important factors. In other words, being terrible at these kind of contests may not be a good predictor of being good at things that count.

  2. Question.. by ashot · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It says that you only need to provide solutions for the two datasets, and that doing it by hand is ok, so whats to keep me from just displaying the matrix for sample problem 2 in a graphics problem, printing it and counting off the number of smiling faces? Even the difficult problem set is not that large..

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    -ashot
  3. Internet??? by Kindaian · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Internet Problem Solving Contest????

    And then the team can only use one terminal and not use the internet???

    ROFL...

  4. Compare around the world? by Fjord · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Problems will be posed in English. During the contest, all communication between IPSC and contestants will be in English. If you are not able to communicate or read in English, you can invite an interpreter to help you with translations.

    Not exactly fair towards non-English countries.

    I also find the no www rule to be kind of bad, only in that it is impossible to enforce.

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    -no broken link