I don't really know who's in charge of the Algorithm Invitational, but I assume he/she reads these forum posts.

First, do the Top-200 competitors from Round 1 get T-shirts as we did 2 years ago?

Second, I competed in the Imagine Cup Algorithm Invitational 2 years ago.  Last year I received an email announcing when the 2005 Algorithm Invitational Round 1 was up, but unfortunately I was too busy to participate (and I was still bitter by the quality of the tests used in Round 2).  At the time, however, I was looking forward to participating the following year, and assumed I would again get an email announcing the release of Round 1.  So you can probably see that I was both surprised and stressed that, when I checked the thespoke.net on Sunday night, Round 1 had already been open for over a month and I had 72 hours to reach the top 200!  I.e., fuck sleeping the next 3 days...

So what happened?  I also noticed my thespoke.net account no longer existed as well, so I assume this is related.  Will emails be sent to past participants next year, or am I expected to be more diligent in checking the 2007 schedule?

Also, as alluded to above, I do hope the "grading" for Round 2 is not as poorly done as it was 2 years ago.  Some complaints I had from 2 years ago (which I did make known) were tests that failed to stress the submissions and requiring the submissions to access files.  This allowed "trivial" solutions to perform extremely well, since the combination of these problems meant that your program spent most of its time (I'm not exaggerating) accessing the input file...if you did this through the .NET framework.  I was told that those who did low-level file access had a huge (and, in my opinion, unfair) advantage as a result.  I realize I'm probably just spouting steam as you probably already have Round 2 set up, but I figured a few suggestions *probably* wouldn't hurt ;)

Thanks,

- Jeff

hi jeff,

i am probably as close to being "in charge" of the algorithm invitationals this year as anyone, though of course i am just a part of a team for doing that. we definitely appreciate the feedback and suggestions.

i am unaware of any plans for t-shirts for the round 2 qualifiers, but i will check on that. regarding communications, i know that thespoke.net was rebuilt from the ground up from the last year and that may have contributed to the communication/login problems.

i am not familiar with the challenge used for round 2 two years ago but i can say the the focus and scoring of this year's round 2 will be on algorithmic performance, not performance of the implementation. it won't matter whether or not you use low-level APIs.

i would be interested in seeing the round 2 challenge from two years ago if you still have it, and in any event i am eager to hear any other feedback or suggestions you have regarding round 2 or the overall invitational. post them here, or PM them to me if you prefer.

thanks,

brian

Well I'm disappointed, I was looking forward to another T-shirt :(

I've uploaded the prompt for the 2004 Round 2 to my school server:

http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jhellrun/Imagine%20Cup%202004%20Round%20Two%20Final%20Documentation.doc

I liked this year's Round 1 better than 2004's.  The Round 1 from 2004 consisted of a 30 question, 30 minute online quiz, to be taken as many times as you liked, but you only got your score emailed back to you 24 hours after each taking of the quiz, and only your last score counted.  Here's the documentation regarding it, if you're interested:

http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jhellrun/Algorithm_Invitational_Intro.doc

I'm not saying that 2004's Round 1 was bad, I just think this year's Round 1 was a lot more fun, so you guys are definitely on the plus side thus far ;)  The strategy I took (and probably all the other top finishers took) was to take the quiz 2 or 3 times a day for several days in a row just to see most of the problems (it was pretty clear after a while that there was a "ver finite" pool from which the problems were drawn), then work them out at your leisure so you'd be able to quickly answer them the next time they came up.  Needless to say, this became somewhat tedious, but fun nonetheless.

- Jeff

 

     Hello Brian,

     Really, no T-Shirt this year ??? This was my main goal this year: reach top200 and get the T-Shirt. So the ones who advanced to round 2, except the ones who will advance further, get nothing to prove they'r worthy ? Quite a dissapointment :((

hold tight, i didn't say there weren't any, only that i was unaware of any. :) actually i have little to do with that side of things. i have asked the powers that be at microsoft and will let you know what i hear.

brian

I do agree there has to be some prize for the first 200 qualified contestants. I've worked over 40 hours on that algo's and I think it's the some for the other participants. Thanks Brian for asking Microsoft about this. Can't wait to hear more about this!

Considering last year, the "best" people in the IT quiz from each contry received a free Windows Server 2003 copy (and considering there must have been like a dozen people from my country, and I had a pretty low score, we must all have got one), it'd only be fair to send out a couple hundred t-shirts to us, right ;-)

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"When all else fails, read the instructions."

i prefer a windows server 2003 or windows vista to T-shirt :D

Yeah, a Vista-Tshirt with Level 46 on the backside :)

@matrix681:

Erm, I'm pretty sure he meant he preferred a copy of Server or Vista *rather than* the t-shirt... not one on the other ;-)

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"When all else fails, read the instructions."