Thursday, February 21, 2013

[Re post]: an ACM experience



(Post written back in January 2011 in my techno blog (which I no longer maintain). Re-posting it here)

..and finally we disembarked at Kanpur.
Competing at the world's most prestigious programming event (even at the regional level :P ) looked just like a dream earlier but not any more. On 11th of December 2010, we were on our way to IIT Kanpur for competing with some of the best coders of this country. We were (Team name: Elites) amongst the top 50 teams of Northern India who were invited to participate at the ACM regional level after qualifying the prelims, which was held earlier amongst more than 200 teams.

On reaching the campus we were greeted with two goody bags. One was from ACM itself and the second came from Directi, the official sponsers of the event. Goody bags were loaded with some really good stuff ranging from T-shirts, diaries to pens and badges. Great hospitality, awesome management and top-class environment at IIT Kanpur were the things they can really boast about.

On 12th December the teams competed for five hours. There were ten problems given. By the end, we managed to solve three problems (and managed to win three pen drives !!! :P ). The team from Indonesia (Dongskar Pedongi) came first solving eight questions whereas team from IIIT Hyderabad (Any Dream) came second solving seven probelms. The team from Hyderabad included Yash Kumar and Nadeem Moidu, who held the second and fifth position in the AOL CodeDash competition too.

But the team that made it to Egypt (for world finals) was from IIT Kanpur (Deep thought). I would like to further elaborate details about the team members. The team consisted of three members:

Raziman TV, who is a blogger and you can visit his blog "Mistranslated" here. He has won many such events both at the regional and the world level. The entire achievements list of Raziman can be seen here. Now possibly he has one more achievement of ACM to brag about!! :D

Shitikanth was the second member. He topped the IIT-JEE 2008 examination (AIR-1). He is a regular codechef member too.

Utkarsh Lath is also a codechef member and much higher placed than his colleague Shitikanth.
With such great coders IIT Kanpur really deserved to win the world finals berth.

Later in the prize distribution ceremony, I was pleased to see my friend Rahul Gulati (Team name: HyperHexagon) secure the tenth place. We (with Prateek Gupta and Ankit Jain as my team-mates) were amongst the honourable mentioned ones as we managed to solve more than one question. With more than half a dozen of certis we bid IIT Kanpur adieu.

Summing up the entire event.. it was really an amazing ACM experience.. :)

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