Victory was ours today, when the James Hales Incredible Taskforce competed in the ACM ICPC. It was a 5-hour competition, going from 10am to 3pm, with a 2-hour briefing and practice session beforehand, and awards presentations afterwards. We were supplied with ACM shirts, and enough food and drink to last the day (food was KFC and Subway). Darcy and Conrad were my teammates of choice. My dear friend Arryn, from Murdoch (also high school), was also competing, but obviously in a Murdoch team, with other Murdoch people.
After 5 hours of work we came 2nd in WA, and (tentatively) 7th in the Australia/New Zealand region. There were issues with the marking of problem C, which became clear when, 3 hours into the competition, no one had appeared to solve this relatively easy problem, despite many attempts at it. Before this problem was fixed, we were placed 9th in the region, and the scoreboard is still not yet officially finalised.
We got medals, certificates and photos taken to commemorate our glorious victory. It was surprising, because the other UWA teams comprised mostly of 2nd and 3rd year students, who were all very knowledgeable about algorithms and programming in general. I realistically expected to place somewhere near the bottom of the pack for UWA (around 6th, say). I'm really pleased with this result; it's one of the few victories I've had that I actually had to earn, by working hard.
I'll link to our victory photo when it is put on the CSSE website.
Update: Reading through the previous version of this post, it seemed a bit egotistical. Purely unintentional, although I doubt anyone would believe me given the team name.
That's the name of my team; I'll explain. I've been attending 5-hour-long training sessions for the last four Tuesdays, in preparation for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition. It's a really serious, challenging competition. It costs $160 to enter a team, over 10 thousand students enter each year, and the vast majority of those students would kick my arse at computer science any day. We (Darcy, Conrad and I) are decidedly the least experienced and capable team of those from UWA.
The good news is that Luigi said we'd definitely be put into the competition, just for the experience, and not because we'd stand a chance at winning or doing even remotely well. We resorted eventually to asking Crazy D for ideas when it came to choosing a team name. His suggestion was probably payback for when I called our Zone team the Crazy D Adventure Squad.
I've had to learn a lot to prepare for the competition, so it's been very challenging and interesting. Most of the new ideas are mathy sorts of ideas, such as dynamic programming, graphs and bits about number theory and geometry. The competition style itself is interesting as well, because we compete in teams of three but only have one computer between us. I think that, to date, I've been behind the keyboard for most (if not all) of our successful solutions to practice problems. That just means that I'm the good one at typing and hacking things together (with my mad Vim skills). I usually have Darcy or Conrad working things out alongside me, which is probably something Luigi would scold us for (they should be working out other problems with pen and paper).
Besides ACM work, I've been working a little on uni projects. I really like the C programming and Computing for Engineers and Scientists (CES) projects. The C project is to make a Rush Hour game. Kieran and I used to play that on my graphics calculator in high school, it was such an awesome game.
The CES project is to write a program to perform edge-detection on an image, and another program to simulate the motion of a mass on a spring. Since CES is billed as a programming course for people who don't like programming, I thought it was a very good project idea; very interesting, but at the same time very basic. A good way to show people that programming can be useful (and fun!)
Earlier this year I entered the IBM Master the Mainframe competition, which required me to complete some tasks on an IBM mainframe computer. It was very interesting, because mainframe computers are very different to typical computers; they're designed to be exceptionally efficient, so you have to make certain considerations that you wouldn't normally make on a personal computer.
Unfortunately, I don't know much about those considerations because I didn't get far in the competition. I completed the first "stage" of the competition before I was distracted by less important computing assignments and exams, and in the end I just forgot about it. I won a shirt, which was the prize for the only stage of the competition I finished. Too bad I didn't finish the whole thing, the better prizes were along the lines of digital audio players and console gaming devices (and more importantly, the tasks would be more challenging and interesting).
This brings the total of unexpected prize shirts I've won this year up to a record high of 2 (the other one was from Google). I guess it shows that you have to be in it to win it. I'm thinking of doing the ACM Programming Competition this year. I could hope for an unexpected prize here, but honestly I don't expect I'll get one. It will be a lot more challenging. Darcy, Conrad and I were talking about this a few weeks ago, so we might be entering a team together. I think the competition at UWA is run by Luigi Barone, a faculty member I do so respect.
I knew I'd get high distinctions in my computing subjects. What I didn't expect was that I'd get a high distinction in Calculus and Linear Algebra, and that it would be my equal best subject for the semester. Obviously this is due to the effects of scaling; my final mark was 96, but I think unscaled it would have been in the 70s at most. It was a really hard subject.
The last two weeks have been pretty awesome. Almost all of my time has been spent either with friends or at my new job (which isn't awesome, but it's alright because I need money to live).
Monday two weeks ago was Indian movie at Bruce's house day. Anita, Amer, Roger, David, Greg and Calvin were also there, and we watched Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, which was in Hindi with subtitles. It was a mushy film, but it made up for that with funny parts and unnecessary (but awesome) Indian dancing. I vow to go to at lease one crazy Indian party with spontaneous synchronised dancing before I die.
Tuesday was find a job day. I drove around for a couple of hours handing out resumes. I was offered a job on Friday and have been working every few days since.
Friday was hang around at Whitfords day. Amer was absent this time, but Neeshima took his place (a fair trade, I guess). Mostly hanging around the place for the day, until we went to Anita's house later to watch a movie (Ratatouille). I tried a few times to convince Anita to like kittens more than puppies. The pet store had an infuriating lack of kittens, but the puppies tried to eat Anita, which will hopefully influence her subconsciously. I also tried to get Anita hooked on Kitten Wars.
Sunday was Mullaloo beach day. Greg was absent, but Cameron and Amer came this time. We played frisbee, basketball and a few games that were invented (rather poorly) on the spot. We had a sausage sizzle, but nobody knew what to do (and thus there were no tongs...). I melted a plastic plate onto the barbecue while trying to use it to turn the sausages over (noxious fumes attack!). Afterwards we went to watch Hancock at Warwick cinemas, and finished off with more fun at some oval on Warwick road.
The second Tuesday was badminton day. At all of these events so far, Bruce, Anita and various others (Neeshima excepted) developed a reputation for turning up about 15-20 minutes late. So when everyone finally arrived at the badminton place at 11:20am, it was too late to play any badminton because it was booked out at 12pm. We went to Bruce's house to watch The Wedding Crashers, came back later to play a couple of hours of badminton, then went to Anita's house to watch (sigh) How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. We stopped around at Kieran's house because we were in the neighbourhood, but poor him, he didn't get to watch the movie at Anita's because he wasn't home.
On Friday and then Monday we had two more movie days at Bruce's house. The first one was School of Scoundrels and the second one was The Da Vinci Code. We also played card games and bought lunch and such. Surprisingly on the Monday movie day, Bruce actually had permission to have friends over. All other days it was secret, and we had to cover our tracks. Bruce is such a delinquent.
My new job is at the IGA in Kingsley, mostly doing check-out work, although I'm supposed to do other stuff from time to time if the place isn't completely busy. My work schedule is 4pm to 8pm every Wednesday and Saturday. I was supposed to do every second Sunday as well, but due to some mix-up that shift has to change. It's not bad, considering weekend shifts are compulsory; it leaves plenty of time for socialising at uni during the week.
Working at IGA has been... interesting. Check-out work keeps me pretty busy during my shifts; there's usually a maximum of three quiet moments during the night, each lasting around 5 minutes, and the rest of the time it is flat-out scanning bar codes and trying to figure out the name of the fruit or vegetable I've put on the scales. People at IGA are nice, though as I said I don't get much time to just stand around and socialise.