Tuesday, June 24, 2014

ACM ICPC World Finals 2014 Practice day

Tuesday started with the practice session. Back when I was competing in World Finals, the practice session had very easy problems, and it was mostly about testing the judging system behavior with respect to time, memory and stack limits. These days the practice session is called "Dress Rehearsal" and it has six quite difficult problems from the previous World Finals. Some teams chose to compete using those problems, and Zhejiang University, world champions in 2011, had the best penalty time after solving all practice problems. Of course, this will have no relevance in the real competition tomorrow.

The practice session was followed by Q&A about the judging system, and then a talk by Bill Poucher which announced several nice things: they're considering adding Python to the next year's available languages, and they're considering making the spot allocation system for the World Finals public and known in advance.

The rest of the day consisted of various fun activities for participants, like football acrobatics, dancing lessons and board games - the last two are pictured on the left. Only a few people participated in those, suggesting most contestants decided to rest in their hotels before the competition.

Tomorrow's competition will be broadcast with commentary at http://icpclive.com/ (more details in this Codeforces post), but I will still try to share my own thoughts via live commentary on this blog. Check back tomorrow!

UPDATE. According to this post, there will be an opportunity to solve the World Finals problems during the contest. In that case, I will be participating together with tourist and meret, and the commentary here will be mostly about our team's work.

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