davidyang.blog(Math.Floor(Action));
05.03.06 10:30 PM


By davidyang
TopCoder Member

Check out antimatter’s fanatically updated TCO06 results wiki.

As promised in the forums, I want to start this post with some videos that better depict the action here at the TopCoder Open. To start, here is the much vaunted TopCoder Arena in full video glory (courtesy of YouTube):



Another vid that brings TopCoders one step closer in answering (or perhaps opens a new can of worms): just how tall is misof?



Because the Arena is limited to only programmers in the current round, spectators are given an outlet for their curiosity in the form of several circular displays that mimic the action on each of the competitor’s monitors. The chatter around the monitors is definitely enlightening, as spectators’ chatter often provides the play-by-play for those of us that might not be able to understand immediately what it means when someone types "six nested FOR macros." Here’s a sampling of some of the conversation during Round 2.

Many were admiring (and fretting) over misof’s work on the problems as he quickly solved the easy problem but seemed to struggle on the medium difficulty one. His (and other target coders monitors) are definitely the most crowded locations as people ooh-and-ahh over everything from an ingenious solution approach to how fast they can type in XEmacs.



Here’s a picture of Petr studying andrewzta's screen. , the victor of the first round, told me that andrewzta is the person that first taught him about programming over 8 or 9 years ago. Nice work!

Another fascinating story of the TopCoder Open is brother coding team and math prodigies ploh and po. Here’s Po-Ru observing his brother in action. Po-Shen earlier admitted that Po-Ru is considerably better than him but of course, Po-Shen proved himself no lightweight either after claiming fourth place in this round.

This Challenge phase started with many participants gunning for the targets as po, pparys and fuwenjie all started by gunning for misof’s problems. Starting in first, kalinov unsuccessfully challenged a problem and then had his hard problem challenged successfully to move out of the top two places with a slight 8 point deficit to nicka81. nicka81 definitely defined himself as the star of this challenge round as he successfully challenged three Hard solutions (misof, kalinov and gevak) to move himself from out of the running into a solid second place. With 10 seconds to go, po made a successful challenge against BjarkeDahlEbert to move into 7th.

As system testing began, the top nine places (Eryx, nicka81, kalinov, misof, fuwenjie, andrewzta, po, natori, and pparys) had all solved problems 1 and 2 with point ranges that made for a lot of possible reshuffling. This has also left all the hard problems of the TopCoder Open unsolved. Rounds of applause echoed as competitors 4 through 9 all solved both problems correctly but was quickly joined by a few gasps as the top three contestants failed their Medium in system test. This took all but nicka81 out of the wildcard running. This reshuffling left misof and fuwenjie in first and second place and moved andrewzta, po, natori and nicka81 spots into the wildcard positioning.