Programming contest
Posted by Martin Orr on Tuesday, 15 November 2005 at 14:04
This weekend I went to Stockholm for the ACM North-west Europe Regional programming Contest. This was a very short trip - we were in Stockholm for about 48 hours from Friday evening to Sunday evening. The organisers had scheduled talks on a variety of computing topics on the Saturday morning; we didn't go to these in order to get some time for sightseeing. I'm glad I did this because the part of Stockholm where the competition was and where we were staying was pretty dull, but the centre of Stockholm was worth seeing. It contains a lot of water - being built on a series of islands - and contains many impressive buildings.
On Sunday there was the competition itself. We solved five problems out of nine, which put us in fourth place. The other Trinity team solved three problems and came around the middle. I was pretty pleased with this position, although I know we could have done better if Mark and I had done a lot of practice at coding quickly as Paul has (however this does not seem to me a useful skill for anything other than programming competitions).
On the journey home, I observed that check-in in Stockholm Skavsta airport was done entirely manually: they had a printed list of passengers on which they ticked your name off and then wrote the details onto a boarding pass.
-- Martin