Wednesday, May 16, 2012

World finals - more coverage

I've just discovered a YouTube channel with many nice little videos the ICPC team releases about the finals: http://www.youtube.com/ICPCNews. Those can be very educational :)

For example this one talks about problem preparation:
Everything sounds logical, the only thing I'm quite surprised about is that they still consider two independent reference solutions to be enough - many other competitions like Google Code Jam or TopCoder usually require at least four as far as I know.

I've discovered this channel via Oleg Hristenko and his World Finals website, which you should also check out: http://finals.snarknews.info/ (list of references to other data sources here: http://finals.snarknews.info/index.cgi?data=2012/blogs&class=final2012&year=2012) (or maybe the automated translation at http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Ffinals.snarknews.info%2F, although the latter seems a little buggy)

5 comments:

  1. As of lately, TC has 3 reference solutions. Although probably 2.5, because the only testers are admins and they are sometimes overloaded with other contests so...

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  2. Ivan Metelsky10 May, 2013 11:35

    I know only couple of exceptions when we had less than 3 solutions for an SRM problem, so thing about 2.5 looks exaggerated.

    Also, if we speak about onsite level, it is 5 independent solutions for the last two years.

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  3. Yeah.

    So what's the secret of the finals running so smoothly each time? Is it that when you have several months to prepare a solution, you do a better job? Or do they just avoid problems that have un-obvious catches?

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  4. Derek Kisman10 May, 2013 11:36

    Well, 2 is just the "official" bare minimum.  In reality, there are several of us (including me, Per, and Onufry) who test-solve the complete set.  I don't think there's been a problem with fewer than 3 judge solutions in quite some time.

    Also, the judges all have a chance to nitpick every problem statement.  15 judges means a LOT of nitpicking. :)

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  5. Thanks for the explanation, everything makes sense now.

    In my experience it was usually the opposite: it's difficult to get somebody else to review the problem statement even if there are many judges, so it's great that the finals' judges are not like that :)

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