All-Ukrainian Student Programming Olympiad. Semifinal. Day 2

In the morning, a few more teams arrived at the hotel — they'd come for the competition. So we only managed to leave on the second minibus. After arriving at the university, we headed to the cafeteria for lunch. This time it made an even bigger impression than the first time, since we ate in the faculty hall and all the dishes had been prepared in advance.

Nowhere else have they fed us this well, if you don't count the astronomy conference in Dnipropetrovsk, but I went there on behalf of the PTL, and the cafeteria there was attached to the hotel, whose rooms had modern TVs.

But back then I wasn't in charge of the money and the lyceum didn't spare any funds, whereas now what sticks in my mind is that lunch and dinner eat up all the per diem, which is also supposed to cover travel and breakfast. Although for the last two days of the trip we won't be eating in the cafeteria, so it works out fine after all.

After lunch there was the opening ceremony, during which representatives of TNU and a sponsor spoke, and during the sponsor's speech I started feeling sleepy. Although it was interesting to hear about nearshoring, the business part wasn't for me.

After a little while, the draw before the practice round began, along with the room assignments. The computer I got was relatively decent, with Win ME installed, 128 MB of RAM and some kind of processor from an older family, but at least it didn't glitch, and that was enough. The monitor turned out to be interesting too: with a scratched protective screen and giving off static shocks.

The practice round consisted of 3 problems, published here earlier. We immediately came up with an algorithm for the first problem and started implementing it, but in the end the solution turned out to be wrong — replacing the type with a larger one led to unknown output for the checking program. Now I think the catch may have been in how the checking program read the result: our program just wrote several lines in a row that represented a single one, and the checker may have read them as different ones. If the output had been written to a file, maybe the problem would have passed.

We also wrote the third problem fairly quickly, and it passed on the first try, so at the 61st minute we got our first solution. After that we took on the second problem, the solution to which one person — the one who writes in C++ — had been putting together that whole time.

At the opening, to our delight, they announced that among the permitted compilers there was Delphi 7 — since 2 of the 3 people on the team know that exact language and are weak at C, the choice of language was obvious. True, to our disappointment they said that points are given for a fully correct solution, not for passing each of the tests.

In short, the solution to the second problem was in C++, but as it turned out, the program crashed while reading data from the file, and we couldn't cope with this problem and finished the round in 16th place, having decided that we wouldn't use any C in the main round.

After dinner and arriving at the hotel, we discovered that the room had a loggia with a wonderful view of the stadium stands, the nearby park and, most importantly, the Crimean mountains. Plus the room was cleaned during the day — another significant difference from the Kharkiv accommodation. After struggling for a couple of hours with the laptop's completely unfamiliar shell interface, launched instead of the standard Explorer; with a bunch of apps that were unnecessary at that moment, eating up RAM and the GPRS internet, which is no good in the evening anyway; I still managed to post the photos of the past round's problems online. After that I started downloading the IrfanView installer, so tomorrow I may manage to make images at a larger resolution and a smaller size.

Edited 19.04.2008