Well, I survived...

[carlfoxmarten]

Which is better than most other teams, though considering the events of the past week, it's kind of surprising that I'm still awake.

First, about the paper route:
Wednesday's papers I managed to finish on Thursday, and Friday's papers didn't quite manage to fit in the time I'd allotted for them, so I finished them today before I delivered today's papers.

So now I'm all caught up and don't owe any papers to any houses (now, if a house got a paper and didn't want one, that's another story. Though not completely my fault...), so maybe I'll be able to keep this up for the next few weeks.
(I should be fine just so long as I don't have anything else to deliver besides papers, like stuffing extra flyers or delivering door-hangers or something like that)

Second, about the programming competition:
My team managed to place twentieth out of eighty teams, which is pretty good for our region, us competing against Stanford and Berkeley and all.
Out of eleven problems, my team managed to identify and solve the four easy problems (which takes a lot of experience, as many times there's layers and layers of extraneous information to obfuscate just how difficult a problem really is.

Had we managed our time better, we might have been able to solve seven problems, which might have ranked us around fifteenth place (as they haven't updated the rankings list on the region's website yet).

Every year the sponsors donate "stuff" (also known as "swag") for teams that show up that kind of advertise what they do and stuff like that (though sometimes you have to wonder just why IBM donated calculators one year. I mean, we get the swag when we sign in at the beginning of the day, get calculators, and can't even use them in the competition! Somebody must not have been thinking properly...).
This year, the Canadian site was sponsored in part by Electronic Arts Canada, so the swag was rather cool: One out of a selection of the games they produce.
Among the options were Battlefield 2, Medal of Honour: Airborne, Harry Potter something or other, Lord of the Rings something or other (I like the books, but am not really interested in the movies or games that have been spawned recently), Battlefield 2142, NHL 2007, and a few others.

As I've been looking for Battlefield 2142 for a good price (i.e., under fifteen dollars. Zellers had it for a while, but the price never really went too much lower than $40.), and you can't really get much better than free, so I chose it.

After I got home I had a good, close look at the system requirements.
I now need a newer computer and another copy of WinXP.
(the primary problem is the graphics card, it needs at least a nVidia GeForce FX 5700 while I have a relatively old GeForce 4 MX 4000. Secondarily I'll need more disk space; it takes up a whopping 2.2GBytes of disk space!)

As far as getting fed went, you could say that we could have kept eating the whole time if we didn't have to write code, so being hungry wasn't really a problem.

As for the set of problems, no team managed to complete all eleven problems, and the most any one team solved was nine, though out of the eleven problems only one wasn't solved by any team.

If I manage to make it onto a team next year, I'll try to learn some more techniques so I'll be able to solve more problems than just the trivial problems...

Comments

[teric.livejournal.com]

Wow Carl, top 25 percent! Very nicely done! Sounds like it was a fun competition, and heck, who can say no to free game software? :)

[carlfoxmarten]

Yeah, that was pretty good, though next year I really need to learn Dynamic Programming, as it's an extremely useful problem-solving method.

teric said:
... and heck, who can say no to free game software? :)

Not me, apparently... ;)

[sleepyjohn00.livejournal.com]

Well done! Just getting there is a challenge, and you outperformed a lot of the competition.

Don't stress over not beating the Stanford kids, they've the kind that grew up getting the latest model of supercomputer every year for their birthdays!

And now you know what to expect for next year, which should make you even more valuable to a team.

Go have fun, you sure earned it!

[carlfoxmarten]

It's kind of weird, because this region is so tough, many teams don't do well (even going as far as trying desperately to solve one of the harder problems) so getting this far was actually really easy (though this was my third year as a competitor, and I should be doing a little better than that), the hard part is actually getting past the hump at the bottom, which is around the top 10 or 15 teams.

Since I can't play BF2142, I may as well play some more MechWarrior 3...