ACM amrita-my experience
I am posting my experience at the ACM-ICPC programming contest held at amrita university.
ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (abbreviated as ACM-ICPC or just ICPC) is an annual multi-tiered computer programming competition among the universities of the world. The first tier of this competition was an online event. Last year it was necessary to send them a draft for Rs. 2500. If we clear the online competition we will be called for the on-site competition otherwise Rs. 1500 will be refunded. This year it was a bit different, it was not compulsory to pay 2500 at the beginning. So you can attend the online competition and if you cleared it then you can pay Rs. 3000 and attend the on-site competition. This increased the number of participants this year.
This year my team members were Jai Keerthi, Ananthakumaran and myself. Ms. Jennifer Joselin was our guide. Last year we were not able to clear the online level but this time we were lucky to clear the online level. There were 4 questions and my friend solved one question and then i solved one. We were trying for the next question for which we had asked the help of our maths mam Ms. Selvarathi. Be careful with the judge notifications, we never took care of it. Judge had issued an extra time of one hour which we did not notice and left the event. Later when we found that we missed a chance we felt very bad. We never thought we will make it to the on-site event.
On-site event was in Kollam, Amrita campus. We had semester exams the day before and the after the event, even then we did not want to miss it. Their hospitality should be surely appreciated. We enjoyed the stay there. We never wanted to win but we were there just to enjoy and gather some experience. The event started and we were able to solve one problem. We were ranked 38th in the event. We had solved 3 other problems but the online judge rejected the submissions saying “Time limit exceeded”. That means our algorithm wasn’t efficient.After the event was over the problem setters explained the way to solve them. Only then we understood that we were not up to their standards. They were speaking about some algorithms and data structures that i have never heard.
It was a nice experience for us to compete with the IITians. There were 4 teams from abroad, one each from China, Korea, Bangladesh and Srilanka. And after the event we returned to college.I wish i had another chance to be there, but now my time is gone. So i thought i will make this post so that it helps someone else.
Have a habit of solving at least one easy problem every week. Learn new algorithms, don’t stop with your syllabus. It will never help you.
I found these sites useful.
