A different kind of round
11.16.06 3:00 PM


By Churchillio
TopCoder Member

First off, on a silly note, during the poker tournament last night I misplaced my digital camera. When I found it this morning inside was this picture. At least it was his face -- it could have been worse! Nice work mathijs, you won round 2 AND scored a picture in this entry.

Another morning round was about to begin, so at 8:30 in the morning the competitors and onlookers head into the arena to start preparing their code templates. This time, unlike the other two rounds, some competitors hadn’t shown up yet. tywok, maone, Revenger, Petr, darnley and all didn’t get to the arena until a few minutes later… maybe the wakeup call didn’t come through in time. At around 8:45 I check darnley’s screen who has the following comment at the top of his template: “//have fun challenging me!”. While Eryx writes a test function which returns “why are you watching my screen?”.

They finish up their templates fairly quickly, and around 9:00 AM they all gather round for the roll call. Before the roll call there is a raffle where a name is called and they win some TopCoder swag. The name is called and it turns out to be one of the UBS sponsors who hasn’t come to the arena yet so they choose a different name: Dave Churchill! I win! I got a shirt, a bag, a fleece vest and a CD holder. Sweet! If only the bag contained some coding skill I might be here again next year...

The voice guy does the intros again, and everyone starts coding. Nine people crowd Petr’s monitor at the start of the competition waiting to see what he will do. This round and nicka81 opt for the 500 point problem first, which is the first time this has happened so far. Everyone else is going for the 250. At about 9:06, there are now 15 people crowded around Petr’s screen trying to get a glimpse of what he is doing.

9:10 rolls around and, in only 10 minutes, both Petr and pparys have both submitted problem 1 for 274 and 271 points respectively. Two minutes later bmerry submits his 300 point problem but immediately goes for the 1000 point problem, unlike the other two. Ten minutes later and there are now 9 submissions on problem #1.

With everyone’s score so close, only 3 minutes have to pass before Petr submits the 500 point question with a full hour left in the competition. Petr must have noticed something wrong with his code because, just 2 minutes later, he resubmits the second problem for a loss of about 70 points. Eryx and pparys then submit problem 2 about 5 minutes later, with Eryx now only 2 points behind Petr’s total. bmerry then jumps to the lead a minute later with a 1000 point submission for 735 points.

There is not much action for about 25 minutes then, at 9:57, Petr is the first to submit his last problem, taking a 387 point lead over bmerry, with bmerry’s clock ticking down at 386 points. As long as nothing drastic happens in the next two phases it looks as though Petr will win. With 8 minutes left the standings shift as darnley submits his last problem and pulls into second place. bmerry then pulls off a last minute submission of problem 2 with only 20 second left on the clock. People who have been watching his monitor, however, note that he sees an obvious bug in his solution, and knows he will not get it correct.

After the coding phase, here’s how the leader board looked:

With a much larger gap between the top 10 spots than the second round, the challenge phase will be important for anyone trying to gain a spot or two -- however the challenge phase ends up getting a little one sided. Here is the rundown... once again the time stamp is how much time remains in the 10 minute challenge phase.

9:35 Psyho fails a challenge
9:08 Petr has a success vs. PMH
9:07 maone fails a challenge attempt
8:50 PMH has a success vs. maone
8:30 Eryx has a successful challenge
8:20 Petr has another success!
8:00 Petr succeeds again in foiling problem 2
7:30 Petr gets his 4th successful challenge on problem 2
7:00 Petr beats darnley, for 250 bonus points now
4:00 Eryx fails an attempt at bmerry’s problem
3:10 Petr has his 6th challenge pass, now having 300 bonus points
2:10 Vovka has a success against pparys, moving him from 4th to 8th place
1:45 KOTEHOK has a success vs. bmerry’s 500 pointer
0:45 Vovka fails against Petr’s 500 point question
0:24 PMH fails a try against Petr as well.

So Petr got 6 successful challenges, bringing his score up to 1687. Before system tests, people note that even if he hadn’t opened a problem he would still be in 8th place, based solely on challenge points. You can take a look at the challenge scoreboard here:

The system tests had a very dramatic effect on the standings this time, with the top 6 changing a couple of spots. With these fails, Abednego, pparys and were able to slip into the wildcard round, joined by Eryx, who stayed in third place. Congratulations to these guys as well of course to bmerry for the second-place finish, and Petr for the stunning victory with a nearly 700 point margin.