It's Saturday morning and we are almost the only people in the Computer Science building at UNSW. After a filling breakfast, the team are all working hard on pen & paper in their first trial exam, in which they must solve three problems in five hours. While the IOI is a computer programming competition, the difficulty of the problems is such that the majority of the work is in thinking of a correct algorithm (a series of steps that would solve the problem). Usually they have the option of coding a 'brute force' solution - such as finding the shortest path between two places by considering every possible path, however such solutions become far too slow to score full marks. Instead, they are looking for clever shortcuts and ways of representing the data so that the computer has to do the minimal amount of work necessary in order to get the right answer.
Yesterday evening we ate a delicious Japanese dinner and were joined by 2010 IOI team members Kenneth Wong and Luke Harrison, as well as informatics student Daniel Goldbach (who featured in
this ABC news story about the April team selection camp). Luke, Kenneth, Chris and I were furiously solving problems to put in today's exam while the team appeared to be contentedly enjoying their teriyaki chicken and salmon sushi.
The sound of keyboard-tapping is now emerging out of the silence... perhaps some have moved from the problem-solving stage to the coding stage!
No comments:
Post a Comment