Tag: Olympiad

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.

Problems are under the cut (254 KB). A report on the day to follow.

I'm starting to publish a few short notes about the semifinal of the All-Ukrainian Student Programming Olympiad among students in the southern region, which is being held in Simferopol.

We got to the city pretty quickly, since the trip isn't long, and I even managed to sleep about three hours on the train. The competition organizers were already there to meet us at the station.

The last day of our stay began differently from the others: this time, after waking up, my teeth weren't chattering — it had grown warmer outside after all, and the heating hadn't been turned down yet. First thing in the morning we packed up and headed to the train station, where we left our things in the luggage storage. After that we set off for the book market.

Heading there, I already had a goal I was aiming for, thanks to a tip given to me by Dimonas. In short, after arriving at the market, I began my hunt for TLK blanks.

On the final day of the competition, the problem-setter was once again from SPbU. This time it was Andrey Stankevich — a prize-winner of international championships, a coach of world champions, a jury chair and member of various Russian championships, and last year's best coach, and these are not all of the lecturer's accomplishments.

The topic of this lecture was "Data Structures for Statistics on Segments".

The author of the problems for the fourth competition day was Andrei Lopatin from Saint Petersburg State University. The lecture topic was string algorithms, specifically methods of substring searching in text. At the start, we were asked who knew what a suffix tree is — a few hands went up, but only a handful could say what a suffix automaton is.

At the beginning we were told about the Knuth–Morris–Pratt search algorithm, also known as the z-function, but even that was hard to grasp, since I hadn't come across it before, and the more difficult part of the lecture passed me by. That part already dealt with searching for many substrings, where the construction of suffix trees and the workings of the suffix automaton were covered, and the suffix array was mentioned. In short, the topic is very useful for any programmer, only it's practically impossible to learn it in a single lecture. That's why I think this kind of string searching ought to be covered in my university's algorithm theory course, and the study of probabilistic automata should be replaced with the study of the suffix one :-)

The morning was no different from the others. The sky was clear, though, so I got some decent shots of the hotel partly hidden by trees and of the nearby arena.

I also photographed the courtyard and part of the university buildings; inside, the guard told me that you're only allowed to have a camera on indoors with special permission. I wonder whether things are just as strict at KhNTU.

Today's problems were set by an author from KPI, but since he couldn't make it himself, the lecture and the analysis were given by one of the members of the IASA team from the same university.

The day began like most of the previous ones: with the Circle of Life song from the Broadway musical, which I quickly cut short by killing the alarm on my phone:-) And this night was warmer, because the heating had finally come on once the cold snap set in.

The lecture began with a "roast" by the Lviv team, whose captain had set that day's problems.

I'm starting to type this entry in the lecture hall before the summing-up of the first day of the competition. The day began in the morning with the end of a dream about a TV series whose third episode of the fourth season was being broadcast in America at that time — the subconscious really is a curious thing. It was rather cold for sleeping, so we'll just wait and see when the hard frosts set in...

The School itself began with a lecture by the day's problem-setter, Vitaliy Nespirny from Donetsk National University.

I'm starting a series of reports about the days spent at the Winter School on Programming, among students from universities in Ukraine and other countries. I'm in Kharkiv right now and writing these notes from my smartphone, so I apologize for the errors in the text and for some missing letters (in the edited messages I've fixed most of the errors). For those who were expecting a post about the white lion, I'd advise waiting — over the course of the month there may be such an entry, though in a somewhat different format. As before, I'll try to fill the journal with messages that are interesting not only to the author but to the readers as well.

Now about the experience itself and the journey to this competition.