AWTF24 pre-contest

On Wednesday, the contestants were gathering in the hotel. The contestants from Europe and America hat some very long flights behind them, so there was not much appetite for activities. Therefore we played some board games in the hotel lobby in between short excursions to get some Japanese food. We did not actually meet most of the contestants from Asia — maybe the reason was that they actually had more energy for exploring Tokyo and did not hang around in the hotel :)

The games of choice (well, those were the only ones I brought so there was not that much choice...) were Cascadia and (Level 1 H-Group) Hanabi. It turns out that the synergies of the H-Group conventions are not so obvious at level 1, so probably next time we introduce somebody to them we should start at least with level 3.

We also got to witness the AtCoder admins printing the logos on the official t-shirts, as it turned out that the shop where one can print arbitrary content on a t-shirt in a self-service manner happened to be on the lower floors of the hotel building. Even though this is not much different from a normal printer, seeing how one can slightly adjust the image and then get an actual t-shirt with this image in a couple of minutes was quite impressive.

Today was a free day for the contestants, who have ventured a bit more into the city having rested from their travels. It was still funny with the timezone differences and jetlag, as the same meal was breakfast for me, lunch for the locals, and dinner for the contestants from America. Some contestants warmed up their problem solving capabilities by doing escape rooms, while others opted for actually solving old competitive programming problems for some last-ditch practice.

Tomorrow is the big day! The overall setup is similar to the last year, but with just one contest: 5 problems for 5 hours, the penalty time is computed as the time of the last successful submission (not the usual ICPC sum) plus 5 minutes for each incorrect submission. You can find more details in Riku's post. And of course tune in to see my and Riku's commentary on the live broadcast which will start at the same time as the contest, 12:30 Tokyo time, and last for 5 hours.

All 12 finalists are very strong, so it is hard to predict who will come out on top. zhoukangyang won 4 out of the last 6 AGCs, tourist has a lot of experience winning those contests, and jiangly has won the AWTF last year  — I guess we can keep an eye for those three, but anything can happen really.

Thanks for reading, and tune in tomorrow!

UPD: the live broadcast link has been updated.