Introduction to Competitive Programming

chrisjrn writes "Last year, I unexpectedly found myself entered in the Australian Computer Programming Competition, and somehow did well in it. As a result I decided to write a guide as an introduction, for high school-level students (and others, I suppose,) into the world of programming competitively based on my experience, and how to go about successfully competing in competitions." Article looks like a good start, I'm sure Slashdot readers can add many more tidbits of wisdom.

Comments

Good Info...

[Knight Thrasher]

Just one tip:
Needs more Caffeine.

Competitive high school programming teams ...

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

Now there's a scary yearbook shot

Re:Good Public Relations

[Nuclear Elephant]

Really, the best way to encourage current high schoolers and college students is support at the school level.

Hot college chicks running the contests always helped encourage me.

My experience

[Reality Master 101]

When I was fifteen, I was in a programming team competition (about 25 years ago). I think we all had Pascal computers or some such. We knew going in that there was going to be one "primary" problem, along with several lesser problems. We would be scored based on the "correctness" of the algorithm, the speed of execution, that sort of thing. The team agreed that I would take the primary problem, and others would work on the other ones.

So I'm a hot shot junior programmer, ready to take on my assignment. Here was the problem: "You have a number of cities mapped on an x,y grid. A travelling salesman wants to find the shortest route between the cities. Calculate the shortest route." We had two hours or something.

I'd never heard of this problem before.

So I was like, "Hey, no problem. This is eeeeeasy." So I went off in my youthful exuberance with a blank piece of paper, figuring out how to solve it. Hmmm. That idea was good -- except it wouldn't work for this one case. How about this idea -- nope, that one will hang up on this other case.

Minutes ticked away as I sweated the problem. There HAD to be a solution to this. Half an hour, then an hour -- I'm growing desperate. What the hell? This problem is freaking hard. Finally I'm like, "screw it" and threw something together at the last minute. We ended up losing because I spent too much time thinking about it.

I still think it was goddamn unfair to give an UNSOLVED PROBLEM in a programming contest for high school students. I'm still pissed about it to this day. Grrr. :D