Helvetica coding contest 2012

Finally, after so long time, I decided to take a test of my coding skills. The Switzerland's hc2 contest is one of the major contests for Swiss high school and university contest. The contest itself is a team contest however. And there is a particular lack of Slovakian ACM team membest here in Lausanne. So I decided to take a wild shot and join Dimitri + one more person from random team-matching. But you know ... plans are usually changing. For such stupid reasons like "washing clothes" (Dimitri somehow failed to reserve washing timeslots in advance and the only ones left were during the competition). 

Therefore, the team (with the random name "The rainbow unicorns") turned out to be formed just by a physicist and me. But I must say it was a splendid combination. During the training session we decided to split responsibilities -- Andrey was being responsible for reading the problem statements and figuring out solutions and I was responsible for transferring them by beating the hell out of the keyboard. And it worked out quite well. In fact, during the first hour, I think we were leading the scoreboard for a while. Anyway, it was a tough competition. 

The moments before the scoreboard freeze (1 hour before the end of the contest) we were on the 4th place with 9 problems solved -- the same number as the second team only higher penalty. The last hour was hectic. We tried to solve different problems but we did not came up with any good solution. Then, after ingenious idea of using apple (taken from free-food area outside of the room) as a model of sphere on which one can draw with a pen (yeah, I was trying a long time to figure out where should I visualize the damn sphere from the problem statement) the idea hit me and we submitted our 10th task. But then nothing. I tried to push one rather-bruteforce solution to the last geometrical task without success (unless you take 9 wrong/time limit exceeded submissions as a success). 

During the final hour and especially before the results announcement (organizers take their time to prepare it) I was getting anxious. What will be the final ranking? How many teams managed to submit the last task during that hour? I was pretty sure that we end up on the fourth place. I was so wrong. At the ceremony, we learnt (from the absence of our name during the backward listing of the teams up to third place) that we actually ended up in top 3. And the surprise after announcing third team was ... hard to describe. It turned out that none of the other teams with 9 tasks before the freeze actually managed to solve something in the last hour. Anyway, thanks organizers for the extremely interesting event and for the tasks -- they were well balanced, not very traditional and very enjoyable. Thanks again!

Silver medal

And the certificate