We didn't tell you that much about the sponsor presentations. The big ones were the Eli Lilly and the Deutsche Bank one, since the NSA one is much more focused on American contestants.

The Eli Lilly presentation was very nice and dynamic. They told us what they were doing in the CS field and also in the meanwhile, they were asking questions about what technologies they used. Whoever got the answer first got an Ipod, nice and simple. That made the presentation really exciting while what they were saying was very interesting. It seems they have great challenges at the pharma industry! And for me, it was the first time I heard some big company was using the semantic web for something useful.

Eli Lilly also got a couple of other stuff going on at their stand. They were giving 3 Ipods to the best 3 scorers at a XBOX360 car game. You could always see some people playing over the stand. The game was incredible, but you needed a lot practice for scoring as high as an Ipod worth. The winner was the polish coder marek.cygan. But the big giveaway was the macbook pro they were giving away for the puzzle. Only 2 persons got the puzzle right, krijgertje and JanKuipers. Congratulations to the Dutch team! But the laptop was given to krijgertje since he got the tiebreaker question better (guess the current number of employees at Eli Lilly).

Deutsche Bank didn't give out so many things during the TCCC, but every coder got a backpack with DB's logo when they got to the TCCC. In fact, there were so many bags hanging around, it was really hard to distinguish one from another. DB also gave some T-shirts and other games (Rubik cubes included!).

The presentation of DB wasn't about what they were doing, but about how they do it. They have a got a coder meritocracy inside their R&D department, where everyone can get as much responsibility as they can accept. The schema looks cool, but they have to work a lot of hours already! We certainly missed some hints about what were the algorithmic challenges they were facing in their routine.

Here are some pictures of the presentations and the sponsor stands.

Since a lot of people are waiting for their t-shirts, I posted some pictures here of all the t-shirts' backs. I hope you like them!

Algorithm Final and Awards

First of all, sorry for the lack of posts, but we have had very serious problems with the TopCoder blogging software. I still have a lot of stuff to tell you! I hope it will all come down in the next couple of hours.

Today the final was the great excitement. We had 4 targets, Petr, krijgertje, ACRush and gawry, and Vitaliy, cyfra, domino and xhl_kogitsune. xhl_kogitsune surprised us all, after getting in second place in the wildcard, opening the problems in the reverse order. As he opened the 500 a lot of people commented he was quite crazy. But his play proof itself the best, since he wouldn't have passed with the easy and hard. It was amazing from his part! That's why we were expecting a risky strategy from his part that sometimes can be very good.

But at the end, everybody opened the easy. It was a quite straightforward problem for most of the coders, but they had to hard-code a graph into the problem with some information about the orientation of the edges. There were a couple of ways to hard-code it, adding the edges in the right order, or adding the neighbors in a string in the correct order. Xhl_kogitsune found a better way, just copy the ASCII drawing from the statement and parse it into a graph . But the important thing wasn't the hard-coding but the time in which you could send it (you could hear the word "Typing contest" a couple of times). Petr sent it for 222 points, but he had to resubmit shortly afterwards. krijgertje and ACRush got the problem for more than 200 points, gawry did the same for 193 and the rest of the pack took quite longer. cyfra even had to resubmit almost at the end of the coding phase. All of them but domino had submitted the 250 by the end of the coding phase.

The medium problem was about expressing a second degree polynomial as the multiplication of two integer polynomials with integer coefficients. This problem which doesn't seem too hard at the first time was quite tricky and contestants took their time to solve it, though it was pretty straightforward also. Petr took 15 minutes and got the first position. krijgertje, gawry and ACRush followed him and they all head to the hard one with around 40 minutes to go (remember, in tournaments, the coding phase is 85 minutes and the challenge phase just 10). Petr was first at that moment with 590, ACRush second with 588, gawry third with 558 and krijgertje third with 537. At the end, also domino and Vitaliy submitted the 500.

The hard problem was beautiful and easy to formulate. You have a factory, and every day you can either produce productivityunits or increase productivity by one. You get till 15 orders on different days for some number of units that would pay you a quantity of money. Of course, you want to optimize the earnings. You need to know which orders to attend, so all solutions tried all the possible subsets of the orders, and then they had to see if they could attend all the orders in that subset. To do so, you want to increase productivity as earliest as possible and you need to produce units just before the orders. Petr, krijgertje, ACRush and xhl_kogitsune (who opened the 1000 after the 250) submittedwith krijgertje leading the pack with a 660 points submission. Later on krijgertje realised that his solution would time out and couldn't speed up the solution in the last 10 minutes. ACRush also resubmitted his solution shortly after the first submit.

With all that, we went to the challenge phase with krijgertje first, Petr second, ACRush third and xhl_kogitsune fourth. There were some very early challenges from Petr on ACRush's  easy and from cyfra on xhl_kogitsune's easy, but both failed. xhl_kogitsune tried challenging ACRush's hard, but failed. Finally krijgertje challenged successfully xhl_kogitsune's hard with the same case that killed his own hard and the challenge phase ended.

krijgertje, who was first, but knew his 1000 would fail, could win in the case all 1000s would fail and ACRush medium or easy also failed. For ACRush was easier because he only needed all 1000s to fail (or maybe not his) and he would pass over Petr because of his failed challenge. Petr only needed his 1000 to stand to win, since he was second after krijgertje. But Petr didn't trust his 1000, so the things really got exciting.

The system tests had to wait for a while, since TopCoder started giving out all the awards from the TCCC. First, the Studio results came in. SIGCHLD got 3rd with 81.04, Tricia_Tjia was second with 83.75 and abedavera won with 87.60 points! Congratulations! abedavera's design was pointed out by many people as their favourite, it really has a lot of tiny details that make it really good.  After that the results of the marathon match came in. Paul Jefferys and Mojito1 switch places for the 2nd and 3rd and paranoia got the first place with a big gap. He is the first American to win a TC onsite contest in a while. Congratulations!

The component competition went as we forecasted in the Meet the coders post. PE took the Development Championship with very solid submission and nicka81 won the Design Championship with also very solid submissions and two wins. This is the same outcome as last year the one from TCCC 06. Congratulations to both for keeping it up!

Finally, the results of the Algorithm final were shown as they usually do in the tournaments. First, the last coders' results are shown. But you get to wait around two seconds when a waiting symbol is posed on the submissions of the coder. The tension increases till the results are shown. For the last coders, the tension is not huge, but the higher ones, it is incredible. When Petr submission passed, he knew he was the winner and jumped celebrating it. This is the second win of the TCCC for Petr! Congratulations! krijgertje got second as his 1000 failed the system test as we expected. ACRush both medium and hard failed, so the third place went to gawry.

Here you can see some pics of the day with all the winners and the algorithm finals.

Here are the studio final designs. I can't tell you whose is whose, because of the rules. We'll know the winner at 5pm. You can also download the submissions from the studio web.

Here are the final studio designs. We will know the winners at 5. I cannot show you the names + the designs, because of contest rules. Sorry!

12:45> The hall is still empty. We are 45 minutes from the start of the coding phase. It seems that the guys must wear their blue shirts with their names written on. ACRush just went to change his shirt because he did not know that fact.

12:55> All finalists are just hanging around. In 5 minutes they should be in the arena for a 30 minutes setup period.

1:00> Today's round has 8 finalists:
Petr and Vitaliy from Russia.
cyfra and gawry from Poland.
ACRush from China.
domino from Romania.
Krijgertje from Netherlands.
xhl_kogitsune from Japan.

1:02> The finalists have started their setup.

1:05> Only Petr, ACRush and domino are doing some setup. The rest are still hanging around, or even did not show up.

1:20> The guys went down from the arena, and had some look on each others setup in the monitors that show the actions on the finalists monitors.

1:28: The finalists introduction was done and everybody is ready to start.

1:30> Coding started and everybody went to the easy.

1:40> kalinov thinks that everybody will be able to solve the easy. It's just an implementation problem. You have to type in some graph and simulate some moves on it. Typing Problem.

1:42> Petr submitted the easy.

1:46> Krijgertje and ACRush also submitted the easy.

1:48> Petr resubmitted and ACRush has opened the medium.

1:52> gawry submitted and all of the 4 who submitted have opened the medium.

1:54> kalinov said that the medium looks very solvable. It's just a factorization problem, but to get it right you should be very careful because there are some tricks.

1:55> PaulJefferys said that Petr resubmitted because he found a case that makes his code time out.

2:00> xhl_kogitsune submitted the easy and still testing it.

2:03> xhl_kogitsune has opened the hard.

2:04> cyfra, vitaliy and domino are still working on the easy.

2:05> Petr submitted the medium.

2:06> ACRush submitted the medium and he is leading Petr by less than 2 points.

2:10> cyfra and vitaliy submitted the easy and gawry submitted the medium.

2:20> ACRush, Petr, gawry and Krijgertje have now 2 problems and working on the hard. domino gave up the easy and went to the medium. xhl_kogitsune have the easy done and working on the hard. The other 2 guys submitted the easy and are working on the medium.

2:22> Everybody here are saying that the 1K is really hard.

2:24> cyfra gave up the medium and went to the hard. I m not sure if that was a good idea.

2:26> ACRush is still leading then Petr then gawry then Krijgertje. The fifference between the first and the 4th is less than 50 points.

2:34> Vitaliy submitted the medium, but he is more than 100 points behind ACRush.

2:40> ACRush submitted the hard.

2:42> Vitaliy didnt even try to open the hard. He is still testing his medium.

2:44> Krijgertje  submitted the hard and domino submitted the medium and went to the hard.

2:45> Krijgertje figured out that he is timing out on the hard for some case.

2:48> Petr submitted the hard and ACRush resubmitted the hard.

2:50> Krijgertje is leading but systest should catch his timeout. Petr is second and ACRush is after Petr by 70 points.

2:54> xhl_kogitsune submitted the hard and cyfra resubmitted the easy.

2:55> Coding ended. Krijgertje, Petr and ACRush with 3 problems. Next xhl_kogitsune with easy and last minute hard. Next gawry and Vitaliy with easy and medium. Next is domino with medium and at last cyfra with only easy.

3:00> Challenging phase started.

3:02> Petr and cyfra got -25. ACRush is now within 53 points behind Petr.

3:05> xhl_kogitsune got -25. Ranking did not change from coding phase.

3:07> Krijgertje successfully challenged xhl_kogitsune hard for 50 points. It's the same case that time out his hard. It was also time out for xhl_kogitsune.

3:10> Challenge phase ended with same rankings like coding except xhl_kogitsune dropped to the 7th place.

3:20> Everybody will receive certificates right now, so i m expecting at least 30 minutes until we know the system test results.

3:36> Petr is the champion. Congratulations!

3:45> Check this shot from the finals on YouTube.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHZoS5lXD00

4:00> Final Ranking:
1- Petr (3 problems)
2- Krijgertje (Easy and Medium)
3- gawry (Easy and Medium)
4- Vitaliy ( Medium)
5- ACRush (Easy)
6- xhl_kogitsune (Easy)
7- cyfra (Easy)
8- domino (Nothing)

Yesterday was the second component competition and things went quite smooth. On the Dev side, there were more appeals solved as yesterday. The scores were also higher and more packed, specially the first and second position, with PE and lyt having a score around 97 and 95. After two days of competition, PE is the favorite for being again the TCCC champion. Here is a screenshot of the clasification during the last 10 minutes of the appeal phase.

 
In the design side, nicka81 won the component with a tiny gap between him and urtks. They both got a 100 from aksonov! Their scores were very high, around 98 and 97 which show the incredible level of the competition. As for the overall competition, looks like nicka81 will take the championship again, since he won the first two components.

 Here and here you can see an explanation from the reviewers about the components that they had to design/develop.

The Universal City Walk in Orlando have started by boarding for buses at 5:30 PM. We have reached at about 6:00 and it was announced that we must be in the same place at 10:30 exactly for the buses to take us back.

It was fun hanging around. Having xhl_kogitsune in the group that I was hanging with, I have asked him about his strategy for tomorrow is it still go first for the hard ?? he said that he is not sure yet, but I can guess that he will go easy->hard->medium.

bmerry under the rain during walk

Anyways, after some walk we decided to get dinner in some restaurant. My group went into "Bob Marley". There you can enjoy live music nighty and authentic Jamaican and Caribean cuisine while you take in the music, heritage and lyrical imagery of the king of Reggae.

A few minutes later we just noticed that all TC staff are having dinner upstairs in the same restaurant. It was surprise for me to see TheFaxman without his laptop. May be it was hidden while i was taking that shot

You may have a look here for the studio finalists while competing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNPR9Q2VvUI

So, we have reached now the end of Thursday competitions; only the studio guys have a few more minutes.

cyfra and xhl_kogitsune are so happy. cyfra said he is really excited about the competition. I told him you just said yesterday that the wild card is the worst round ever, he answered that he just changed his mind I did not have the chance to talk to xhl_kogitsune yet, but he already give some talks to TC channel guys.

cyfra celebrating

These are some videos I took for the algorithm competitions:

Room 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-OkBrxDHps
Room 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzQvtKBNPP4
Wild Card: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8uBzF9aVwA

Now everybody is getting ready for the Universal CityWalk Night. I will get back with news later tonight. Stay tuned!

Yesterday, during the poker games, our newbie in poker and tccc blogger moh_taha_eg (we showed him the rules of texas hold'em yesterday and he knew the plays from TC problems) had great moments. The biggest one was during the last game, in the last hand. Most of the people had already gone to sleep, kalinov and me had already been kicked out. It was all between moh_taha_eg and lovro. The start betting hard before the flop, till moh_taha_eg went all in before the turn. Of course, lovro called. Here is a picture of how the hand ended!!

 
lovro hand in on the left, moh_taha_eg is on the right, and the three flop cards are the one on the right. So, lovro won with the turn. 
 
 
 

Look what I found yesterday on my bed!

 
PD: It said "Just married", I still don't get it. 

The marathon match ended yesterday at 5pm, though we won't know the results till tomorrow. But we got some shots of the qualification after the end of the Marathon round. They don't correspond to the real ones because doudouille had a problem with the copy/paste of an older solution. The problem they had to solve was about driving a tank and shooting a number of targets in the least time possible. The higher you got on the terrain, the farthest you could shoot. The targets, that in the visualizer were represented tanks though they didn't shoot at you, moved randomly through the terrain. Sometimes the competitors had to follow the tanks in order to shoot them. Other good strategies were to get on the highest point of the terrain and shoot everything you could. But they also had to predict were the tanks were going to move in the next turn. Here is a small video of one run of the tank hunting. The  orange spot is the tanks shooting range, you can see how it gets bigger when getting higher.

Finally, here is the clasification just after finishing:

And here it is the one with the corrected doudouille submission:
 

 I've been taking to paranoia and PaulJefferyes about the results and the difference they expect from the provisional ones, and the calculated that the variance of their score where about 0.07 points, so there might be major changes in tomorrow's final clasification. We'll see tomorrow!

Here are the designs by now. It is quite amazing to see the how the designs get better and better within hours. These people are amazing! I really want to see their final designs!

Here are two very good ones:

sql_lal got some nice problems when working with the new TopCoder UML tool. The Ok button is in the center of the error message

 yiuyuho realized his solution was going to fail after he submitted it. Nice comment!

1:57> We are about to start, the participants have finished their setup.

1:59> There was no introduction for the participants this time, they will start immediately.

2:03> Everybody started by the easy except xhl_kogitsune who went for the hard.

2:05> The weights for that round are normal 250/500/1000.

2:10> We have got submissions from marek.cygan, lovro, jakubr and Egor. All of them are still testing their submissions except lovro who went immediately to the medium.

2:13> Per, cyfra, kalinov and Savior also submitted the easy. All the 8 guys who submitted the easy have opened the medium next except Per who went for the hard.

2:16> Burunduk1 and Konqueror submitted the easy and went for the medium and hard respectively.

2:21> lovro gave up the medium and went for the hard.

2:23> Savior also gave up the medium and went for the hard.

2:24> sghao126 submitted the easy and went for the medium.

2:34> Burunduk1 and Egor submitted the medium and went for the hard immediately.

2:35> kalinov gave up the medium and went for the hard. It seems that croatians contestants think alike.

2:36> Savior also gave up the medium and went for the hard.

2:42> cyfra and marek.cygan submitted the medium and both went to the hard.

2:43> Per gave up the hard and went for the medium.

2:44> Well, i m having a small video on youtube for "Algo Room 3"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzQvtKBNPP4

2:47> jakubr gave up the medium and went to the hard.

2:49> Everybody now is working on the hard except Per and sghao126 who are working on the medium.

2:52> xhl_kogitsune is back; he submitted the hard, but still testing it, he did not open neither of the other problems.

2:55> xhl_kogitsune moved to the medium.

3:00> im2good said the 250 is pretty straightforward and the 1K also but the 1K is a bit tricky and need careful coding. He is expecting some few more submissions on the 1K.

3:07> sghao126 submitted the medium and still testing it. We beleive he will not go for the 1000 because of lack of time.

3:08> Per submitted the medium and still testing it also.

3:13> Egor submitted the hard; he looks so confident.

3:17> sghao126 just opened the hard, may be just to make some challenges cases.

3:19> xhl_kogitsune impressed everybody and submitted the medium getting the second place after Egor who have submitted the 3 problems.

3:21> marek.cygan submitted the hard. Now, it's Egor then marek then xhl_kogitsune.

3:24> cyfra, kainov and lovro submitted the hard trying to keep their chances.

3:27> The most favored guys are Egor, cyfra and marek.cygan having 3 problems. Then xhl_kogitsune having medium and hard. Then we have kalinov and lovro both having the easy and hard. It seems seriously that lovro and kalinov thinks alike.

3:30> All spectators are just in front of the big monitors watching the challenging phase.

3:32> kalinov challenged lovro's hard.

3:37> Per got -75, jakubr -50, Savior -25 and burunduk1 -25. kalinov made 1 successfull and 1 unsuccessfull challenges.

3:37> Per got -75, jakubr -50, Savior -25 and burunduk1 -25. kalinov made 1 successfull and 1 unsuccessfull challenges.

3:57> cyfra and xhl_kogitsune to the finals. Congratulations.