Online Computer Programming Contest

4th Round Wrap Up by Dan
Wednesday January 20, 2010 At 06:27PM
Today's round ended with team Cyril from Don Mills Collegiate Institute in first place, closely followed by HeadlessException and beef-cheese from Vincent Massey and Lisgar Collegiate Institute respectively.

The round went smoothly with over 110 teams submitting solutions and only a minor typo in question 3.

We hope every one had a good time and would love to hear your feedback, comments and criticisms so we can improve the contest. See you next round.

4th Round by Dan
Wednesday January 20, 2010 At 02:28PM
Today is the 4th round of the 2009-2010 DWITE contest and the first round of 2010.

We have 183 teams singed up to take the contest today with over 374 students.

Have fun and good luck!

Round Wrap Up by Dan
Wednesday December 16, 2009 At 06:28PM
The 3rd round was rather close with a lot of high scoring teams. Team No Pseudo Fishing took first, closely followed by Roses of May and beef-cheese tied with FailExpected.

Over 127 teams submitted solutions this round.

We hope every one had a good time, and wish you a happy holidays. And as all ways if you had any problems, suggestions or comments please let my self (Dan) or Tony know so we can improve the contest for the next round.

December Round by Dan
Wednesday December 16, 2009 At 08:43AM
Today is the 3rd round of the 2009-2010 DWITE contest.

We have added an option to run your C code under the C99 option in gcc for this round. To see what parts of the C99 standard gcc supports go here. Of course the option to run C code normally with gcc is still present.

We have 180 teams singed up with 389 students, so it should be a fun round.

Round 2 End && Dataset problems by Tony
Wednesday November 25, 2009 At 07:04PM

There were a couple of problems with the dataset used to judge the submissions. In Question 2 I temporary forgot how to add numbers together, making the maximum possible score be 4/5. For Question 3, there was a mistake in describing the sample, and propagated itself into the test data. If the disconnect between the intend of the question and the data was not bad enough, the nature of the output made it so that any extra (or missing) line would shift all the answers by one.

Think of it as filling out a multiple-choice test on a scan-card, but by accident, you start filling in the answers from line 2, thinking it was line 1. It was that kind of bad. As discussed on the forums, a proper as intended solution should have scored 1/5 + partial points for most of the 2nd set. Though some teams managed to score more by coding at the data rather than at the intend...

I suppose I should have foreseen having problems, when the Starbucks employees told me to stop working on the questions and go home at 1am. A discussion with a friend illustrates the situation well:

• s.n.: it's insane, I haven't slept more than 6 hours a night
• Tony: oh, so that's no different from a typical Waterloo term
• s.n.: :)
• Tony: I'm on my 2nd set of triple expresso shots, it was a horrible idea
• s.n.: hahaha yeah, do NOT do that. Ever again.

Somehow, I've been managing to avoid having cardiovascular problems in my 20s.

Otherwise Round 2 went well. The improvements to the judge's marking speed were a huge success, crushing out scores for 151 submitting teams.

I don't feel like naming any particular top spots, as the scores were close, and the problems with the 3rd question have introduced quite a bit of variation. Still, it's the kind of teams/schools one would typically expect to see at the top based on the previous rounds.

There were a couple of schools new to the top 10 list that I wanted to point out though -- Lisgar Collegiate Institute and SATEC @ W. A. Porter C. I.. The latter has a school website that is absolutely unusable with JavaScript turned off. Someone from the No Pseudo Fishing team should let their school know about Web Accessibility (unobtrusive javascript in particular) and security. This little rant aside, congradulations.

Now if you excuse me, I need to go pass out. Any comments could be emailed to me or discussed on the forums.