A postcard week

The July 3 - July 9 week had a pretty busy weekend. On Saturday, IPSC 2017 has gathered a lot of current contestants together with veterans that come out of retirement just for this contest every year (problems, results, top 5 on the left, analysis). The (relatively) current contestants prevailed this time, with team Past Glory winning with a solid 2 point gap. Well done!

They were one of only two teams who has managed to solve the hardest problem L2. It went like this: we start with a deck of 26 red and 26 black cards, and a number k (1<=k<=26). The first player takes any k cards from the deck, and arranges them in any order they choose. The second player takes any k cards from the remaining deck, and arranges them in any order they choose, but such that their sequence is different from the sequence of the first player. The remaining 52-2k cards are shuffled and dealt one by one. As soon as the last k dealt cards exactly match one of the player's sequences, that player wins. In case no match happens after the cards run out, we toss a coin, and each player wins with probability 50%. What is the probability of the first player winning, assuming both play optimally?

Just an hour later, TopCoder Open 2017 Round 2B selected another 40 lucky advancers (problems, results, top 5 on the left, analysis, parallel round results, my screencast). dotory1158 had a solid point margin from his solutions, and did not throw it all away during the challenge phase, although the contest became much closer :) Congratulations on the win!

The final round of VK Cup 2017 took place in St Petersburg on Sunday (problems, results, top 5 on the left). Continuing the Snackdown trend from the last week, two-person teams were competing. The xray team emerged on top thanks to a very fast start - in fact, they already got enough points for the first place at 1 hour and 38 minutes into the contest, out of 3 hours. Very impressive!

And finally, AtCoder hosted its Grand Contest 017 on Sunday as well (problems, results, top 5 on the left, analysis). Once again the delayed submit strategy has worked very well for tourist, but this time the gap was so huge that the strategy choice didn't really matter. Way to go, Gennady!

Problem D in this round was about the well-known game of Hackenbush, more precisely green Hackenbush: you are given a rooted tree. Two players alternate turns, in each turn a player removes an edge together with the subtree hanging on this edge. When a player can not make a move (only the root remains), he loses. Who will win when both players play optimally?

If you haven't seen this game before, then I encourage you to try solving the problem before searching for the optimal strategies in the Internet (which has them). I think the solution is quite beautiful!

Thanks for reading, and check back for this week's summary.