Meeting 25.09.2014

The first meeting of the club. Here are brief notes:

• Introduction: Problem-solving competitions are fun and useful. There are many different kinds of them, depending on the topic (programming, math, data analysis, design, software development, robotics, etc), and format (on-site vs web-based, short-time limits, long time limits, coding vs prediction, fixed answer vs challenge, team vs single, etc). Even if you do not plan to devote your life to competitions, experiencing them to some degree will never hurt. The "club" could be a great place to discuss various geeky topics including, but not limited to competitions, organize geeky events and the like.
• Amnir made a short presentation about the ACM ICPC contest. Here are the slides (pptx).
• TopCoder hands-on
  • Register a user account at TopCoder.
  • Launch the TopCoder Arena (Challenges -> topcoder Arena)
  • Log in using the account you just created
  • Using the menu above, go to Practice Rooms -> SRMs -> 1-25 -> SRM 144 DIV 2.
  • Select the first task (use the "Select One" dropdown, choose "200").
  • Read the problem statement, select your language, write the solution.
  • Test your solution on some examples, then click "Submit"
  • Finally, use "Practice options -> Run System Test" to check your solution for correctness.
  • Click on "Tools -> Room Summary" to see everyone who has ever tried solving any tasks in this match.
  • Double click on some of the green scores to see the code of the corresponding solutions.
  • Continue exploring TopCoder, consider registering for the next contest (single round matches happen at least once a week).
• USACO
  • USA computing olympiad training website is among the best resources to learn competitive programming.
  • Go here, register an account, log in, and start doing the curriculum. Completing the first 4-5 chapters will pretty much guarantee you are skilled enough to pass to the ACM regionals, for example.
• IEEE Xtreme
  • IEEE Xtreme is a 24-hour team programming contest that will happen on October 18 this year.
  • You need to form teams of three people and register them ASAP (Oct 4 is the last deadline, but the sooner you do it, the better) according to the following procedure:
    • Go to http://www.ieee.org/go/join_student and start the sign-up process, but pick a throwaway password.
    • When you get to the point where you're shown an invoice and a "check out" button, just log out and leave the "shopping cart" as is.
    • Send your username and password to Eiko Kängsep and CC to Benson Muite (that's why the password has to be a throwaway one).
    • Eiko will log in as you and pay the fee for you.
    • In addition, let Benson know exactly who are the three people forming your team. Benson will need look up your membership number to register the team, so you can help him out by providing it in the email.
    • After that you can log in to IEEE yourself again and set a proper password.
    • Obviosly, if any of the team members is already a IEEE member, the first part of the protocol does not apply -- you only need to let Benson know what is your membership number in the "Here's our team" email.
• ACM ICPC
  • ACM ICPC is the most famous annual programming competition for the university or college students. It takes place in several rounds, the first being the selection round at our university. The round will take place some time in the first half of October, so stay tuned for more info.
• This club
  • As noted, we plan to have club meetings at least once a month. Sometimes those may be more frequent. In particular, the next meeting will be in two weeks. Oleg promised to give some useful guidance about the preparation for the ACM ICPC selection contest.
  • Feel free to propose any other constructive ideas as to what could be a topic to discuss or devote a meeting to. Those could both be in the form "I'd like to know more about" as well as "I'd like to make a workshop / tell you about ..." or even "Let's just meet for practicing", etc.
  • The TODO page here is meant to collect such ideas and search for people willing to contribute.
  • In general, note that the whole website is a publicly-editable Wiki, so if you feel that you have some useful information / links / ideas to add here, do so. This is a PmWiki, in case you need to know more about how the markup / attachments / etc work.
• EIO
  • A topic we did not discuss much on the meeting, but that is still worth mentioning here at least: if anyone of you (among those who speak Estonian) is willing to help with the organization of Estonian high-school informatics olympiad, contact Ahto Truu.