[virulent]

I participated in ACM-ICPC regionals back in November and it was a lot of fun. I definitely recommend it to anyone that has the chance to go to preliminaries next year.

The time limits are quite brutal for some of the problems @ finals, most of them I'd never have a proper optimal solution for.

Also, the fact that Peking understood and solved A in just 5 minutes is crazy. Sure, I could at least do A, but they practice enormously just for these.

[anonetal]

Not denying the rest of what you say -- these teams are scary good, but A was really simple -- lot simpler than the first problems I remember from when I coached our school's team.

I just tried the brute force solution in Java, took me maybe 3-4 mins to code up and it finished with the max value of n in less than 1s.

[virulent]

I agree that A is really simple. I was pretty surprised to see that as a problem.

Was that 3-4 mins from first starting to read it to finishing a solution? If so then great, but personally I would've taken 10-15 minutes because I'd be carefully reading it first and wondering why it sounds so simple.

[anonetal]

Yes, I did know that someone did it in 5 mins, so that helped :)

I think it took me 9-10 mins in total, including testing on the provided inputs. I think I could have done it in a few mins faster 15 years ago when I competed (never made it to the Finals though). Also typically: one of the team members would immediately start coding up the first problem while others are working on the next problems, with the assumption that the first one is quite simple.

[kenrick95]

I was in the regional (Asia-Kuala Lumpur) where Tokyo University team (3rd in the frozen scoreboard) solved all of the 12 problems in 2.5 hours (out of 5 hours). Yeah, it was really demotivating to see someone else have completed all problems yet you just solved 4 problems. In the end, although my team solved 6 problems and finished at 22nd place, I can say that joining ACM-ICPC regionals is one of my greatest moment in this uni life.

[virulent]

Wow that's crazy, no doubt it must have been really demotivating.. I was in the Northeast NA regional and MIT (#11 in the frozen scoreboard) only solved 6/8 of the problems at regionals. Most of us only solved 1-3.

[muehlbau]

Is it still allowed to have a set of prepared implementations for standard algorithms and data structures? Still impressive to just need 5 minutes.

[kenrick95]

You're allowed to bring a reference material of 25 pages, single-sided, A4 or letter size.

http://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/on-site-registration

[felixgallo]

that's amazing. I would love to see an example team's document.

[virulent]

Stanford's is pretty nice: http://stanford.edu/~liszt90/acm/ (notebook files). There's also one from a Korean university there.