Dutch programming contest/programming

Posted on 2003-10-27 by ivo :: /programming :: link

Last weekend, I participated in the Dutch rounds of the InterCollegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Since we ended on the highest place of all teams from Delft, we can continue to the Northwest European finals (NWERC), in Lund, Sweden. The final score list lists our team (ECFh) on the sixth place, but Quintiq and ASML are companies, so they don't count on the score list for students.

While this is good news in general, it is weird. Instead of sending the top-10 teams to the NWERC, the top-x teams from each university are admitted. I'm not fully familiar with the rules and regulations of the admission policy, but this strategy seems flawed.

The problem set was horrible. The problems were written very badly, with clear errors and very vague wording. The examples weren't really supporting the text, and sometimes a restriction was only given in the explanation for the example input/output.

I realize it's not easy to write a clear, challenging problem set, that still leaves enough pitfalls to make it interesting. But please, don't clutter the goal of these contests with weird requirements. For example, there was a problem in which the input was given in Roman numerals. The problem was hard enough to do in decimal numbers, the Roman numerals just make it harder to verify input and output. I don't think that this added value to that particular problem.