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Internet Problem Solving Contest 2004
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!"
...in the world still can't fix the problem of stupid user syndrome.
I wonder if it's anything like Odyssey of the Mind
I know I won't be at my best at 6 in the morning...
Can't I just get a T-Shirt, and *SAY* I participated?
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.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14
What was the whitespace language from like 2 april fools' days ago. I'll use that.
Either way you look at that .. thats a problem I'm definitely in for solving.
Funtage Factor: Purple
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.
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.
Don't think I could do it...
Not even slashdot??!
This could actually be THE way to show your friends the superiority of both your skills and your favourite programming environment!
All the hours of practice, the computer science degrees, all the long dateless Friday nights coding, I now know they have led up to this contest. Why I can program anything, except for this emotion you call "love."
Don't mess with the bunny, outsideworld.org
Friends?
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
PHP? pfffft. Perl? pfffft. C++? pfffft. Hell I don't know even know of any more languages. Not that any of them matter. I can finally prove to the world that HTML is more than just font and table tags. HTML really is all you need to know. And I use Microsoft Frontpage. I'm SO gonna win.
The competition has been outsourced to India.
I hope the participants code - a new AOL software - an Outlook-Skin for TheBat - a new IRC protocol and - WinXP Servicepack 3
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Maybe it will be on ESPN9.
This may just be the one thing I was waiting for to justify the expense of expanded cable.
And who should we get to announce the action? I vote for Steve Ballmer (Monkey Boy), that will get the crowd going and cheer on their programming teams.
Karma, We don't need no stinkin' karma!
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.
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.
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..
-ashot
Internet Problem Solving Contest????
And then the team can only use one terminal and not use the internet???
ROFL...
I heard that second prize is you get a tv aerobics instructor to go with you to your next sci-fi convention and pretend to be your girlfriend.
First prize is William Shatner records the outgoing message for your answering machine.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
... 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?
FLR
[14:45] New IRC protocol ? What's wrong with current ones ?
[14:47] <Animaether> Hello ?
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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.
-no broken link
"If an employee has at least one Hour of Service during a Plan year commencing on or after October 1, 1989 and has received credit for five (5) or more Credited Years of Service, or has not received credit for five (5) or more Credited Years of Service but his aggregate Credited Years of Service completed before his Break in Service exceed the number of his consecutive Break in Service Years, has a Break in Service, then such Employee's Credited Years of Service completed prior to his Break in Service shall be aggregated with Credited Years of Service completed after his Break in Service for all Purposes of the Plan. Notwithstanding the foregoing, no Credited Years of Service shall be considered which were to be disregarded as of September 30, 1989 under the plan provisions then in effect."
It had to be written in RPGII on a System 36, no less.
Proverbs 21:19
From http://ipsc.ksp.sk/:
/. is the best place to start looking!
We have encoutered problems with delivering registration e-mails to the following teams: Incubation, Shandong Province Team in Informatics 1#, asar, Orenburg SU 2, Runtime Error, KP, GuoXiaoPeng, kutaisi1, TDT, Haaak. You have just probably misspelled your e-mail address when entering it in the registration form. If you do not provide us with a valid e-mail address, we will not be able to deliver you responses of the online judge as well as announcements during the contest. Please contact us at ipscreg@ksp.sk.
That seems like a pretty obscure problem to solve. Man, I tell ya! These problems are getting harder and harder every year!
OF course, if it's something as simple as mispelling their names,
Internet Problem Solving Contest????
I bet Al Gor's people are behind this contest
3.243F6A8885A308D313
The ACM Contest is similiar; it's linked at the bottom of the IPSC website. You have 5 hours to do 6-9 problems. Most are a real pain and brute force usually won't work... it needs to be time and memory efficient. But it's fun. Their website has a ton of problems, like 10,000+, and you can submit to there online judge... it always gives me something to do on Friday/Saturday nights.
Ardente veritate incendite tenebras mundi