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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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7 November 2002 - 2:23 am
I promised you a few additionally insights into the acm programming contest, so here they are.
1. You never really appreciate your editor until you have to do without it. Lets face it, emacs isn't really the slickest editor around, but it sure beats the pants off realj, which lacks useful features like proper tabination and parentheses and brace matching. When you consider that the C++ guys were using Visual C++, a pretty decent editor, I really believe that realj cost us at least 30 minutes of time.
2. All the problems fall into a small set of easily identifiable categories. With the proper training, you could probably optimize the order that you solved the problems based on their category. Oh, the categories are (roughly) algorithm/data structure problem (where implement a canned algorithm), simple brute force problem, formatting problem (where you have to spend gobs of time formatting your output), intelligent problems (where you have to show some insight because the brute-force approach will fail because of time or space constraints). There might be a couple of others. Leave a comment if you know of one.
3. How you organize your computer time will probably closely correspond to how many problems you get done. One computer for three people can cause a lot of headaches.
WU|ACM is thinking of running their own programming contest, so if you think you'd be interested in participating, you might want to keep an eye on their webpage.
Posted by on 7 November 2002 at 2:24 AM
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