Facts about the 2nd competition session and task selection..
from Gyula Horváth and András Benczúr
Left: Point intervals; contestants (On-site contest); Right: Point intervals and Tasks
The task selection for the contest
Work in progress...
Describe a problem story in natural language that is similar to an “everyday” life situation. This means that the story specifies a possibly infinite number of instances. Next, there are given some problems, questions that have to be solved or answered for the situation. Finally, the input data structure is specified, that typically restrict the problem to a more specific problem.
To be successful in solving the task, the contestant has to find a good algorithmic approach for the story, the input and the questions. After that, she or he must find an efficient algorithm, or a good data structure, or both that solves the task for each possible input instance. That’s not enough, they have to implement the algorithm and the data structure in general programming language, type it fast, test it and send it to the evaluation server. The server than runs the code for the set of input instances and it measures the processing times. Achieving the highest score is possible if an only if when the selected algorithm is as fast as the theoretically fastest algorithm.