Tiring week
Hmm...i seem to be tired quite a lot recently, and this week is no exception.
This is mainly because it's coming into programming competition season :) That's right, I'll be competing in the TopCoder Open (TCO), Google Code Jam (GCJ), ACM (university-level) and TopCoder Design competitions, plus keeping track of the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) at which I know all of the australian team. This week was a bit messy on the designing side, as I was the only person who was working on this particular project. I knew this was going to happen, because I had intentionally signed up for a difficult program in order for the practice, and a few days in I asked for an extension. Then, when it was more obvious that noone else was doing it, as well as the project specifications being changed twice, I asked for the extension again (I'd had no response from the first time). This time, they actually said no...so on wednesday i didn't go to uni and instead worked on the design most of the day, and finally submitted with not much time to go. Then I see that 40 mins before the submission time (40 mins out of the 7 day timeline) they decide to tell people that they've extended the deadline...40 MINUTES!
Anyway, at least this meant I had 2 more days to fix all the last-minute errors i'd put in in my haste, and make it much more likely i score enough to earn money. It turns out that noone else submitted, even given the extension, so I'm the only one and if I score >70% i get US$800 :D - this is on the back of my last payment coming through PayPal into my bank account with a turnover of about 5 weeks (Paypal seems like a good service :)).
In the other contests: GCJ qualification starts monday, IOI started today with first competition day on monday, and on wednesday while taking a break from designing, I managed to qualify for the second round of the TCO and hence get another free t-shirt. However, the GCJ is the main one, cos being the rich people they are Google are paying for the top 100 in the second round to go to america to compete in an onsite final...would be coooool.
Apparently there's a bit of a problem with the reliability of blogchecker...I'm sure this is just webpal's unstable hosting, so if this ever happens to you, just try again a bit later, or close your browser and open it again...i dunno.
The code this week comes from my one-line solution to one of the TCO qualification questions:
This is mainly because it's coming into programming competition season :) That's right, I'll be competing in the TopCoder Open (TCO), Google Code Jam (GCJ), ACM (university-level) and TopCoder Design competitions, plus keeping track of the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) at which I know all of the australian team. This week was a bit messy on the designing side, as I was the only person who was working on this particular project. I knew this was going to happen, because I had intentionally signed up for a difficult program in order for the practice, and a few days in I asked for an extension. Then, when it was more obvious that noone else was doing it, as well as the project specifications being changed twice, I asked for the extension again (I'd had no response from the first time). This time, they actually said no...so on wednesday i didn't go to uni and instead worked on the design most of the day, and finally submitted with not much time to go. Then I see that 40 mins before the submission time (40 mins out of the 7 day timeline) they decide to tell people that they've extended the deadline...40 MINUTES!
Anyway, at least this meant I had 2 more days to fix all the last-minute errors i'd put in in my haste, and make it much more likely i score enough to earn money. It turns out that noone else submitted, even given the extension, so I'm the only one and if I score >70% i get US$800 :D - this is on the back of my last payment coming through PayPal into my bank account with a turnover of about 5 weeks (Paypal seems like a good service :)).
In the other contests: GCJ qualification starts monday, IOI started today with first competition day on monday, and on wednesday while taking a break from designing, I managed to qualify for the second round of the TCO and hence get another free t-shirt. However, the GCJ is the main one, cos being the rich people they are Google are paying for the top 100 in the second round to go to america to compete in an onsite final...would be coooool.
Apparently there's a bit of a problem with the reliability of blogchecker...I'm sure this is just webpal's unstable hosting, so if this ever happens to you, just try again a bit later, or close your browser and open it again...i dunno.
The code this week comes from my one-line solution to one of the TCO qualification questions:
return *min_element(T.begin(),T.end())).substr(6)+
"-"+(*max_element(T.begin(),T.end())).substr(6);
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