What is Yarin thinking about?

Yarin moves on

by MaryBeth Biondi, TopCoder Staff
Friday, April 4, 2003
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Maybe it was the later-than-normal start, or the fact that there are so many onsite tournament newbies, but the tournament room was bustling with traffic for the Round 1 competition. More in line with past tournaments, however, the problem set seemed to be the big winner of the morning.

Yarin, evd and yike started out the round by opening the 200 point problem first. In what may have been a strategic error, StefanPochmann took the opposite route by opening the 1000 pointer first. Yarin submitted first, gaining 170.84 on his 200 point solution. evd sent his solution in second for 155.93 points on the 200-pointer. yike was in third, getting 129.35 on his 200-point problem. Even before StefanPochmann could submit his 1000-pointer, Yarin sent in his solution for the 550 point problem for 337.35 points. The 5th submission of the morning came from StefanPochmann, giving him 424.74 points for the 1000-pointer. Further testing prompted StefanPochmann to resubmit his 1000-point solution, which cost him an additional 124.74 points, leaving him with exactly 300 points on the problem. In the meantime, evd and yike attempted to solve the 550 point problem, while Yarin worked away on the 1000 pointer. StefanPochmann surprised the crowd with a last second submission of his 200 point problem for 163.65 points.

StefanPochmann waited until there were 10 seconds left in the Challenge Phase to provide the only action by unsuccessfully challenging yike's 200-pointer. At the end of the challenge phase, the scores were Yarin with 508.19, StefanPochmann with 413.65, evd with 159.53 and yike with 129.35.

System tests were kind to everyone except StefanPochmann, who lost all his points due to a time-out on the 200 pointer and a small bug on the 1000. The results for Round 1 of the 2003 Sun Microsystems and TopCoder Collegiate Challenge are a follows:

Congratulations to Yarin on a solid victory this morning! Good luck to the Round 2 competitors - axch, dmwright, mathewsb and niteneb.