"A Competitive Programmer's Handbook" was posted to Hacker News, for anyone who doesn't visit that site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14115826

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Occupy Babel!

I majored in computer science and started to learn about computer science in 2002. It was pretty exciting to me at the time (mostly because of video games), but I learned about go - something that seemed even more interesting - around 2003, just a year and a half later.

Since then, programming wasn't something I was passionate about - just something I had to do to make money.

From this year's competition, programming has become interesting to me, again. I like that

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be immersed

Anyone managed to advance to R2? I tried R1B, but only solved A (which isn't even enough for top 5000 ). Not sure if I have the motivation to wake up at 2am to try R1C, but we'll see...

Also, on an unrelated note, I got introduced to this really cool math channel on youtube called 3Blue1Brown, and it's full of awesome videos that I've been watching while eating dinner. They have a video where they talk about a very interesting way of generating the sequence needed to solve the Tower of Hanoi problem discussed earlier using binary numbers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SUvWfNJSsM

I didn't end up participating in R1B. We went to the Washington State Fair, instead. I have been practicing programming pretty much every day, though.

Particularly, I've been studying recursion problems. I think I have a weak point there. Actually, the bigger weak point is what Shaddy already pointed out - I think I have an idea of what to do, start programming, then realize I didn't think everything through. I'm trying to consciously think the problem through all the way before writing it up. That takes some effort, sometimes.

Not sure if I want to do R1C, given the time.

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be immersed

Maybe we should have weekly Lifein19x19 competitions for programming, similar to your weekly tsumego rounds? I set up a contest using the Kattis platform with several problems that are recursive / DP in nature: https://open.kattis.com/contests/nhx45f/. I have it set to start this Friday 7pm PST and end on Sunday at 9pm (50 hours). If there's enough interest in this, I can create a separate thread in Off-Topic where we can discuss ideas and code. (And I promise I haven't done these problems before, so I'll definitely be giving them a shot ).

Sure, I'll play

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be immersed

I haven't made an attempt yet. Round 1A started at 3am my time, and round 1B at 6pm on the Saturday of our big local go tournament, so neither was an option. Round 1C is at 11am on a Sunday, sounds perfect

That sounds like an awesome idea! I'll love to play. Also didnt get a shot at the last codejam round, but 1c should be alright.

I'm hoping to do 1C as well, but these ultra short rounds are quite challenging to fit in when you've got other calls on your time. Couldn't do 1A/B. Definitely preferred the 24 hour prelim round.

I participated in 1C and solve A-small, A-large, B-small, B-large and C-small-1, which got me 516th place, qualifying for the next round.

Problems 1 and 2 were not hard, but took me way too long due to silly bugs, typos and whatnot. So I only had 30 minutes left for problem 3 and only attempted the first data set, which has an additional constraint making it much easier than the second.

Sadly, although I qualified, I won't be able to compete in the next round. I have a prior engagement exactly at that time

Ended up not having time to participate maybe next year

Good job, Herman

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be immersed

Congrats Herman! I tried to do 1C, but it didn't take long before I just felt too tired to keep focus and called it a night after an unsuccessful simple greedy solution. It was fun! Hope to see everyone here next year .

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Looking at the scores further, there were 8 people who got 100 points, and a whopping 772 who got 72 points, same as me. So my 516th ranking was mainly lack of speed rather that lack of problem solving ability. If I want to do better, I would have to work on that speed. I must say that doing every problem within a total 44 minutes, as the winner of round 1C did, is nothing short of amazing. My hat off to them.

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Trying to derail a thread by advertising your product, especially when it's not relevant to the topic being discussed and doing so while demeaning everyone else participating in this event, is a violation of the forum rules djhbrown. Consider this a warning, next time's a ban (and I removed a link to your product due to its irrelevancy here).

i insist that i did not intend to demean anyone, nor to undermine anyone's purpose, least of all those to whom i was appealing.

there is no product; just an idea; a non-copyright idea.

since my post was capable of misinterpretation, and my sense of humour unwelcome, i have removed it.

It's that time of year again - the qualification round for Google Code Jam 2019 is this weekend And interestingly, here is the header image they chose...



I have no idea if this means that some of the problem tracks will include some Go-related content, but that's not impossible given their emphasis in recent years. I guess we'll find out starting this Friday

(By the way, I wonder if anyone recognizes the position on the board? It's not, as far as I can tell, any of the AlphaGo games against Sedol or Ke Jie, though maybe it's one of the hundreds of Master games)

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The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain, and simple to express: Err, and err, and err again; but less, and less, and less!

The position is from game 1 AlphaGo vs Fan Hui.