Found Out About CCC Yesterday...

[Coding_Guy]

Thanks guys, i'm already reading this stuff, but i gues, i'll write junior this year,

@whlue this page, you linked, for some reason isn't found

[OneOffDriveByPoster]

http://acm.uva.es/p/Art_of_Programming_Contest_SE_for_uva.pdf ... This site has trouble with periods.

Anyhow, with memoization the biggest problem is if your recursion does not make use of overlapping subproblems effectively. Look out if your recursion has parameters that can be derived from the other parameters--your memoization should not include those extra parameters.

[r691175002]

Thanks for all the tips guys, I really appreciate it. I feel a lot more confident now.

The teacher did not guarantee that Java would be installed, I practiced a bit with C++ and I personally find the standard library too cumbersome, so I will be bringing an old laptop with Java 1.6 on it so I have that option. I find that structs make it easier to code quick problems, so I may alternate languages.

My copy of Programming Challenges arrived today (lol) so I will get some reading in. I will probbably do the senior unless there is a pretty major jump in difficulty. Good luck everyone!

[r691175002]

Update: Took senior, Finished S1-S4. I brute forced S2 and fell back on area formula where n > 5000.
Expecting a mark of ~56. Had 50 minutes to spare for S5 but to no avail.

[Nick]

heh I did S1 and S2 and failed on the last three but did calculations on how to actually do them

I didn't finished them all but I will try next year and by then I should be able dto do better

[r691175002]

Im not going to lie, I really think that the junior was harder than the senior this year.
I didn't really look at it, but the pre/postfix operator question made no sense to me and S5/J5 were the same.

The senior test had some harder problems, but S3 was a textbook graph problem and most of the other ones were pretty traditional.

[Nick]

I find jounior easier J4 was hard to understand but once it clicks its easy just string manip

[Bored]

I never got a look at the junior competition, but all I know is S5 was extremely hard. I couldn't figure it out for the life of me. I'm definately going to try this one once I get home. The rest of it seemed pretty easy and I'm pretty sure I got all of the first four. But honetly S5, I just couldn't get in time.

[CodeMonkey2000]

s1-s3 were easy, s4 was AAAAA, s5 was straight forward. My computer froze on me halfway through. I was soo pissed. VC++ on win98 sucks ass. I kept getting messages that I'm out of memory. Apparently VC++ uses 10 megs per file and we are only allowed 50 megs. We need a good computer lab. Windows 98 should be euthanized. I freaking hate it.

[pistolpete]

don't know if anyone else noticed, but j5 is the exact same problem as s5 this year. Apparently the only difference is in the test cases.

Anyways, i kind of bombed the juniors. The c++ compiler wouldn't work on my computer so I had to go through the entire contest without testing it. So it took me 1.5 hours to do the first four questions (the first programming language I learned, Scheme, actually used prefix notation so I was pretty comfortable with j4), took another 1.5 hours thinking about the last question which I didn't finish. When the time was up, we found a computer that would work and I ended having 3 compiler errors on my 4th solution and 2 on my 3rd, all of which were fixed in 5 seconds. But my CS teacher wasn't accepting them so now technically the only solutions I have are 1 and 2.

[StealthArcher]

I got 1 and 2 done effortlessly, then overwrote my number 1 file without knowing it, my 3 kept crashing for unbeknownst reasons(I still cannot figure out why...) , and then I had to rewrite my 1.

[OneOffDriveByPoster]

Waiting for someone to post the problem set...

[StealthArcher]

For number 3?


You live on pizza, friends drew yu pizza map lol.


These mean the following:

+ move any direction
- only east/west
| only north/south
* block

get from north west corner to southeast


sample input:

1
2
2
++
++

answer:
3

[Coding_Guy]

wow guys, i gues, it will take me a while to reack your level, i only finished first three juniors, and couldn't understand how input was comverted for the forth one, unless i could search for an algorithm online, which is called "cheating"

[Clayton]

I nerfed S5 good.