TopCoder Open 2009 - First Two Days

So how does it go here at the TCO? Well, I have to admit that the atmosphere is quite a bit more 'neutral' than usual. There's little people talking to the sponsors, there's just one or two groups at any given moment talking to each other, people spend quite a bit of time with their own laptops. Why? Maybe it's the reduced amount of Algorithm competitors, which might be more talkative than others; maybe it's that most competitors don't actually compete here, since the results for most tracks were ready before the start of the event, so they just don't come at the Arena and explore Las Vegas attractions instead. I'm sure that TopCoder will find a way to address this problem, since each TopCoder event was always very exciting, and they should become even better, not worse :)

Speaking of yesterday's semifinal round (Results) - all went well. I didn't make mistakes, I had time to stresstest both the second and third problem solutions, and I was lucky to find a reasonably easy-to-write approach for the third problem (I've used Arena compiling and testing a lot to run dummy programs that will help me see which approaches will run for reasonable time - it's probably the first time I do that at an onsite round).

And here's a couple more lousy videos. First one shows the announcement of semifinal's results (you should press the "HD" button if you want to see the handles):

And this one shows the breakfast room today - just to give you a picture of a TCO place other than the Arena. Notice how people are grouped by language (Spanish, English, Chinese, Russian):