ICPC 2003
I’m just back from IIT Powai, Mumbai. I’ve not had access to a computer, let alone the internet, for the past few days, except during the competition, so I’ve been unable to update my blog. Anyway, the contest went off well, although we had a host of problems with our systems. On Saturday, during the practice session, the system wouldn’t even start up PC2, or the documents. Finally, the organizers allotted us the AIUB Blue team’s machine as they didn’t even turn up.
On Sunday, although everything started up fine, PC2 wouldn’t log in to the server. After to and froing between two systems trying to get PC2 to log in, the organizers did something and finally got PC2 to log in, thanks to which the start of the competition got delayed by almost an hour. To top it all off, the team from Shanghai Tongji University managed to solve two or three problems within the first hour and apparently were relaxing after that. None of our solutions were accepted which was most disappointing. Most surprising that our solution for the first problem, decoding, was running fine on our machine but was giving a run-time error on the judges’ machine. For all our other submissions, we got a wrong answer reply. Perhaps our algorithm was wrong altogether or our implementation was wrong.
In any case, the entire event is over. I can no longer participate in the ICPC, but maybe I can coach my juniors to try and take the first place next year. I’ll try to put up the contest questions later. I’ll also try to get the judges’ data, and if possible the output and solutions from some of the guys from IITB.