Contest Report by Chris Handley

Problem Set and Analysis

The contest went fine, after sorting out the end of line problems associated with running the server on an NT machine and the judges and teams on Linux boxes. This year Stewart Fleming could not act as Technical Director as he was involved with a sister's wedding in Edinburgh and a duathlon in Switzerland (in the middle of the European heat wave), so Nick Meek occupied the hot seat. We eliminated the problems with the "Run" button in PC^2 by informing the teams that it did not/would not work and leaving them to test their programs from the command line. (Oh that we could have done the same, we had to anyway most of the time.)

The next hiccup came when a sharp-eyed team realised that there was a problem with the sample input and output data for Problem 6. I fixed the output data file, but was not aware that the input file needed fixing also, as I thought that the input was coming in unsorted. This caused many problems for the top two teams in particular, one of whom lost nearly an hour on this.

Congratulations to all teams who entered. Thanks to a good range of questions, all teams got at least 3 problems out. Special congratulations to The Pumpkin Lemma (Bartosz Fabianowski, Birger Brunswiek and Phil Mcleod) as worthy site winners and NZ Champions. It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if we had had fewer problems -- they were under half an hour from solving two more problems. Congratulations also to Indra's Pearls from Canterbury who were doughty contestants. It was a close run thing in the end.

Thanks to Nick Meek for setting up PC^2 and nursing it through its hissy fits and also supervising the revision of the data files to conform to Linux expectations; to Cathy Chandra our Linux sysadmin
who kept everything going and checked for inappropriate network behaviour by the teams; to Ken Sutton, Andrew Trotman and Ramakrishnan Mukundan for coaching; and finally to Allan Hayes and
Malcolm Mills for setting up the site in The Link (outside the University Library) and then taking it all down again at the end of the day.

All the best to the team in Prague next year. It should be a good contest with the UNSW team.

The contest at Dunedin was held on the mezzanine floor of The Link building at Otago University rather than the usual pokey old computer lab. While this provided a far more open and airy atmosphere for the contestants and judges alike it did present additional problems for technical staff. All the computers used in the contest had to be transported across campus on the morning of the contest, set up and a temporary network installed. Mercifully no one tripped over any of the miles of network and power cables and none of the equipment suffered while being carried up and down multitudinous stairs.
	Team Members: Bartosz Fabianowski Birger Brunswiek Phil Mcleod Institution: University of Otago Region Placement: Dunedin Site Champions Top N.Z. Team
Team Members: Institution: Region Placement: I couldn't actually tear the contestant in the centre away from the computer which is why this photo doesn't have the posters in the background. Twenty minutes after the contest had ended this chap was still working away. I said 'The contest has ended!', but he didn't seem to be listening
	Team Members: Institution: Region Placement:
Team Members: Institution: Region Placement:
	Team Members: Institution: Region Placement:
Team Members: Institution: Region Placement:

[top]