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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!"

11 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. I wonder by BrianGa · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder if it's anything like Odyssey of the Mind

  2. convergant or divergent solutions by Engineer+Andy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I would be interested in seeing the extent to which people with similar training come up with similar solutions based on using the standard toolkit they are accustomed to hauling out for any problem. The other outcome would be of people are sparked into thinking outside the box by the competition not being tied to the "this is the way the company does this sort of thing and so you shall follow this methodology".

    Thinking in my own field of engineering, if you gave people problems to solve outside of the work environment you would probably get a far more creative set of solutions than you would if people were set the same problem at work in the context of a project.

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    1. Re:convergant or divergent solutions by The_reformant · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I dont really think this has anything to do with the sort of training you receive in the workplace. These are abstract problems which are a prime candidate for testing an applicants knowledge of fundamental algorithms and how to select the best datastructure for the job.

      Looking at the sample set of problems the tiling problem and the dependancy problem should be able to be solved optimally (in terms of time complexity) fairly easily since they are both simplifications of well known problems in CS.

      The smiley face problem is quite interesting and i agree that this one could expose some really good creatinve thinking.

      All in all based on the sample problems I think this competition would be ideally suited to strong computer science students or recent graduates. Most people in the work place have totally forgotten all of the necesary kind of skills since in the real world they don't work quite so well

      To be honest it makes a change to have a situation that favours students over those with experience in the industry. Slashdot all too often slams graduates fresh out of uni simply because they make mistakes due to lack of experience in the field.

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  3. Prediction by roman_mir · · Score: 4, Interesting

    judging by the number of entries and the percentages of countries per entries I predict that at least 3 places out of the first 5 will go to the Russian teams, one out of the first 5 will go to a Chineese team, and the last one out of 5 will be another East European team.

    I won't participate since I have work to do.

    --
    You can't handle the truth.
  4. suck rules by poincare · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From http://ipsc.ksp.sk/rules.php

    Each team may use only one computer or one terminal (one keyboard and one monitor).
    You can't have a distributed team working through the internet.

    It is forbidden to use systems for symbolic computation (e.g. Mathematica, Maple, Matlab) and special libraries (e.g. LEDA).
    Most of the programming languages listed (Pascal, C, C++, Java, Basic, Smalltalk, Lisp, Logo, Perl, Python) have symbolic libraries, but it looks like you can't use those and'll have to reinvent those wheels. Hmmmm.

    1. Re:suck rules by imbaczek · · Score: 2, Interesting

      They state the rules and have no way of really enforcing them, so...

  5. Re:Whitespace Language by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/

  6. Re:will take place on Friday May 21st. by AuMatar · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Friday May 21st at 2 pm GMT+2. 1 hour from now. Happy coding to any US teams pulling an all nighter for this.

    Actually, the sample problems looked interesting. 1 and 3 wouldn't be too bad. 1 could be solved by a list of packages each with a list of dependancies, and remove dependancies as you find them. Hash table it if you need better speed. After the last package is added to the list, anything with 0 dependancies can be added. To deal with multilayer dependancies, whenever you clear out all dependancies from something, remove it from everything in the list. I believe it would be worst case O(n^2*m) where n is the number of packages and m is the total number of dependancies. Probably could be sped up, but thats what I can think of off the top of my head.

    Third can be solved trivially with a backtrackking search that just brute forces it.

    The second one has me for a loop, it seems very difficult. I guess you'd need to find the top of the head, search down and find the eyes, and again to the mouth. That seems to be the evil one.

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  7. Re:The most superior coding environment... by jaavaaguru · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Does C# count since its "based on Java"? ;-)

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  8. similar means, similar solutions by davids-world.com · · Score: 4, Interesting

    While most programming languages are turing-equivalent, they do shape the way we THINK about a problem.

    What strikes me in this contest is that it's not problem solving that is asked for, but "thinking in a procedural or object-oriented way".

    Contrary to the original post, I CANNOT use my "favorite" development environment. My favorite environment is the one that suits the task, and for many tasks, I prefer to use Prolog. The fact that they exclude logic formlisms and also the Internet as today's vital research medium means that this is not about solving novel (and hard) problems, but more about the old compare high school student's skills when given a well-known problem in a very restricted environment.

  9. I won something like this... by Cytlid · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... in high school. It was about 1990 and called something to the effect of "International Computer Problem Solving Contest". Of course then it wasn't about the Internet at all, and the programming was done in Basic on 286's. Think our school had one or two 386's at the time. They gave you something like 4 hours to solve 5 problems... and they were pretty hard (well for me being a sophmore at the time). You could work in teams, a friend of mine David and I were a team, we took first place for the school in answering 3 questions in the allotted time. Had we done 4, we would have gone to the national level. One of the downsides, I can remember we were only allowed to use one computer.

    Anyone know if this is related? I didn't see any mention of it on the site, maybe it's a coincidence?

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    FLR