back from KL

And so I'm back from KL, Malaysia. I do miss Singapore, even though the trip to IIUM (International Islamic University Malaysia) was short. The organisation of the contest wasn't as great as I hope it would be and the food was kind of horrible. Yet despite all these, this contest was won by an all females team (Lollypop) from Shanghai Jiaotong University. I guess this serves as a source of motivation.

Our "international" judges were Shahriar Manzoor, Sohel Hafiz, Syed Monowar Hossain and Rujia Liu. It was a nice opportunity to see how do the frequent problem setter on UVA online judge look like. We were honoured to have the event graced by Prof Dr William Bill Poucher and Prof Dr CJ Hwang.



We were rather close to solving another question, but due to a few mistakes made here and there, we didn't have the time. So it went like this: Aditya found a simple question, coded it and got it submitted in 8min. Then Shafeeq went on to code question A, while I was cracking head over the question on number theory and the question on triangles, both of which I couldn't solve. Aditya then moved on to solve question F, after Shafeeq submitted and got a WA. He tried using memorisation for that question but it wasn't correct. I hijacked the terminal and coded a BFS for that question and it got accepted on the first attempt. Shafeeq got the terminal rights again and Aditya sent out to work on question J, while I continued cracking my brain over the 2 questions. Aditya then coded his DP solution but it wasn't correct, so we are back to square one. Then Aditya and I were discussing about question E. I initially suggested that the question could be solved using greedy, but with some discussions with Aditya, it dawned upon me that the question was actually a maximum matching question. I hijacked the computer and coded the solution. However, I made a mistake and my program got into an infinite loop as I missed out one line of code when typing from my helpsheet. I gave the terminal rights to Shafeeq who had discovered his mistake after some discussion with Aditya and came up with a solution. It finally got accepted. I was searching and searching my print-out for the mistake but I couldn't find it. It was only until Shafeeq looked over my code and spotted the tiny mistake I got it sorted out. Thankfully, it was accepted on first submission. The last hour we tried coding question B. The string input was extremely tricky and we had to resort to a mix of C and C++ functions to read in the input. Too bad we didn't have the time to code finish Aditya's DP solution for that question.

Shafeeq, me, Aditya and Steven Halim (our coach)