Sunday 26 October 2014

Something Unimaginable !

Though I'm late but still I won't stop myself.Wishing everyone a very happy and prosperous diwali .

This is the first time I was participating in ACM ICPC regionals and we got selected for one but the sad part is that we got selected just because of the rules of the competition .

According to the rules of the competition - Firstly, those teams will be selected which have solved at least 1 question and are first from their college,if slots are left then teams will be selected from the rank list according to the merit.

As you can see that it may happen that from a college where many good programmers are participating a highly potential team may not get entry to the regional while a not so good team may get it easily.

Let me show you an example - Suppose there are two colleges X,Y

X is a very big and renowned college and has around 50 good programmers .

Y is not so big college and doesn't have programmers at par with X .Lets say somehow, Y comes up with 1 team.

In the contest around 7 teams from X solve 2/5 problems , 8 teams solve 3/5 problems and 2 teams solve 4/5 problems .

On the other hand team from Y manage to solve 1/5 'the easiest of all problem' and gets rank 1 in their college.

So, according to the rules it may happen that the teams which solved 3/5 problems don't get selected as they are not the best in their college but as Y's team was the best in their college it will get entry to the regional. Sounds unfair right ?!

That's what happens every year in the Olympics of programming ACM ICPC .

 Nevertheless , we got selected and we should try our best to prove our selection right. 

We missed Kharagpur online contest.It was scheduled at 2 to 5 PM and due to our negligence we thought that it is at 6 to 9 PM because for Amritapuri regional it was from 6 to 9 PM .
I came to know about this at around 5:45 and we were dumbstruck. This was one of the biggest mistake we would have ever done but I told my teammates not to worry about anything we still have Amritapuri and we will give our best there.

Surprisingly on Diwali day I got a surprise that due to some reasons they are re conducting the contest on Oct 30 and luckily, very luckily we got another chance for the contest. This time we won't make any mistake .

This week I solved problems from SPOJ and participated in codeforces round also . After a very long time I again participated in the online contest on codeforces and stood 1285 from around 2000 contestants . 

Question: Is it time to change the selection procedure ICPC regionals ? Leave your comments below .

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