Algorithmic Competition Winter Camp Report

This was a week long camp held between Jan. 26th and Feb. 3rd, where we welcomed 19 students from 5 different universities. Under the guidance of Kevin Atienza, participants faced many examples of algorithmic questions and on the final day competed against each other in teams of two,  in line with the ACM ICPC - International Collegiate Programming Contest format.

 
 
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Our coach Kevin Atienza was an ACM ICPC World Finalist in 2012. He won second place in the Google Code Jam 2016 World Finals held in New York City and prepares questions for HackerRank. Therefore, he is a prominent judge and problemsetter in the international algorithmic programming contest community.

We had an AMA session with him where our participants had the chance to ask all their questions, since Kevin’s experience is such an example for those who are planning to walk through the same path.

 
 
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Here are the types of questions we’ve worked on:

Day 1: Warm up topics (Brute-Force, Greedy, DP, Construction, Union Find, Binary Search, Offline Processing)

Day 2: Math-y problems (DP via Matrix Exponentiation, Combinatorics, Recurrences + Generating Functions, Polynomial Multiplication, Number Theory, Diophantine Equations)

Day 3: Graphs (Trees, LCA, Graphs, MST, etc.)

Day 4: Range queries (Segment tree, Fenwick tree, Treap, Persistent data structures)

Day 5: All problem types/topics. (Mock Contest)

Day 6: All problem types/topics. (Mock Contest using the ICPC Manila problem set)

 
 

During the free days we had throughout the camp, we employed our time having morning yoga sessions, a table tennis tournament and exploring Beykoz Kundura and it’s museum.

 
 

After the camp, we started Algorithmic Competition Study Group with 7 of our participants. Every Saturday, we compete with each other and solve algorithmic questions after freshening our minds with morning yoga. Our goal is to have an intensive study group where we’ll cover many types of questions, which will serve us bring ICPC first medal to Turkey.

 

Here are some of the highlights from the camp: