So, today a few kids from my AP computer class and I participated in the Providence College High School Programming Contest. The contest consists of ten problems that you have to solve over a period of 3 hours and 15 minutes. The team who solves the most problems correctly wins, and in case of a time the team who took less total cumulative time wins. There are a few more rules, such as you only have one computer per group of four, and you can only have two people in the room with the computer at each time.
Our school came in 4th place out of about twenty teams, which is not so bad. We solved 6 out of the 10 problems correctly (6 other teams solved 6 problems, but we did it in the shortest time) so we did as good as we could for the amount of time we did it in. First, second, and third place got 9, 8, and 7 respectively.
Technically we solved 8 problems perfectly, but we couldn't finish typing one, and one of them kept getting rejected because of how horribly worded the problem was. We didn't figure it out until we were talking to other teams afterwords that the example shown took the input in a way that was ambigious. The judges were inputing them opposite from the way we did. The only example showed the input for the first and second number as 4 and 4, but when used with 3 and 4, ours gave the answer it should have for 4 and 3. From the way the problem was written, there was no way for us to know this. If they had an example with two different numbers, or at least said which was supposed to come first, we would have come in a place higher.
Actually, about half of the problems were worded very badly, and it was particularly infuriating to read something half a dozen times and still have no idea what they were asking.
But yeah, it was a lot of fun. When we arrived in the morning they had donuts and juice and coffee. About half way through the contest part, they sent one member from each group down to get pizza. There was plenty of soda, the entire time, and to entice us to stick around for the awards ceremony, they topped it off with letting us make our own ice cream sundae. It was awesome.
I'll probably post some of the problems that we didn't finish in the programming forum when I get them from my friend who has my packet. I'd like to see how a few of them are done and I'm sure there are people here who can do them rather easily.
