TopCoder Open 2012 Finals preview

This year's TopCoder Open finalists are a very diverse group of people. The most telling statistic, in my view, is the time when they first acquired 3000+ rating on TopCoder (not surprisingly, all of them did at some point :)):

• andrewzta - May 2006
• ACRush - September 2006
• Egor - January 2007
• marek.cygan - September 2007
• RAVEman - June 2010
• meret - July 2010
• shangjingbo - December 2011
• [[iwi]] - July 2012

So we have four people that I'd call veterans, playing the TopCoder algorithm games at the top level for at least five years, and that group is clearly separated from the other four, who have only reached the top recently. None have been the TopCoder Open champion yet, though!

Here are the micromatch scores between the today's finalists (the first number is how many times the person on the left has been ranked higher in rated TopCoder rounds, the second number is how many times the person on the top has been ranked higher):

Handle	ACRush	marek.cygan	andrewzta	Egor	meret	RAVEman	shangjingbo	[[iwi]]	Average
ACRush	0/0	68/23	60/27	98/37	15/2	85/14	30/2	70/9	82%
marek.cygan	23/68	0/0	51/51	73/53	6/6	57/18	13/11	41/13	56%
andrewzta	27/60	51/51	0/0	69/53	6/6	43/20	7/9	36/14	53%
Egor	37/98	53/73	53/69	0/0	16/18	90/67	41/14	71/36	51%
meret	2/15	6/6	6/6	18/16	0/0	15/14	15/9	18/11	49%
RAVEman	14/85	18/57	20/43	67/90	14/15	0/0	39/17	70/41	42%
shangjingbo	2/30	11/13	9/7	14/41	9/15	17/39	0/0	14/25	34%
[[iwi]]	9/70	13/41	14/36	36/71	11/18	41/70	25/14	0/0	34%

A funny aspect of yesterday's Wildcard round was that fourth-placed people from both Semifinals advanced, meaning that we'd get just the same set of finalists if four advanced from each Semifinal and there was no Wildcard. Historically, Wildcard round advancers has won TopCoder tournaments once (tomek in TCO 2008), got second place twice (ZorbaTHut in TCCC 2004, JongMan in TCO 2007).

What strategy would people use at today's finals? Judging from the semifinals, [[iwi]] will go Hard-Easy-Medium while everybody else will use the usual Easy-Medium-Hard order. I'm pretty sure the TopCoder admins want to make sure at most one person will solve all three problems, which might well in practice mean nobody will solve all three, so starting with Hard (or doing Easy-Hard-Medium) does look like a viable strategy. I'd propose Easy-Hard-Medium switching to Medium if Hard is not solved (and it's not clear how much is left) about 30 minutes before the end.

Also take a look at vexorian's finals preview at http://community.topcoder.com/tco12/our-algorithm-finalists/.

What other stats on finalists would you like to see? :)