Participating in and representing India in the finals of World programming contests is second nature for the students at IIIT-H. This year has been no exception with the team TooWeakTooSlow topping the regional finals of the ACM-ICPC (Association of Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest) to represent India at the 2018 ACM-ICPC World Finals.
This year’s World Championship round was hosted by Peking University on 19 April, 2018 in Beijing, China. Touted as the “Olympics of Programming”, the hugely popular Battle of Brains pits teams of 3 university students against 8 or more real-world problems within a 5-hour deadline which tests their logic, teamwork strategy and mental endurance. Upto 135 teams from over the world are typically invited for the finals.
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The TooWeakTooSlow team comprising of Tanuj Khattar, C. G. Vedant, and Rajas Vanjape, all 4th year CSE/CSD students, consistently won the regional onsite as well as online rounds ranking as the number one team across India. The other Indian teams to advance to the finals are from IITs – Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras, Patna, Rourkee and IIIT- Bangalore. According to the ICPC website, this year 46,381 contestants from 2,948 universities in 103 countries competed in regional competitions at over 530 sites worldwide.
The young men assert that “the performance of the institute at the regional level has been better than the last 2-3 years with our juniors also performing well at the regionals”. Admittedly the team carries not just expertise and experience, with Tanuj and Rajas having made it to the finals of the ICPC last year as well, but a lot of pressure too. “But this pressure is what pushes us to practice and improve”, quips Tanuj.
When asked about their preparedness for the European competition they were up against, the team admits that finalists from the other countries have an edge in that they are exposed to computational thinking from an early age. However, they hasten to add that at IIIT-H, unlike other Indian technological universities, one is introduced to the programming culture and encouraged to participate in competitive programming from the first year onwards. This, along with the guidance from seniors plays an important role in the institute’s winning streak, the team avers.
Tanuj shares the team’s experience of the finals and recounts some of the immense pressure that they had to surmount. “This was my second (and last) time at the ICPC World Finals. We were much more relaxed this time and wanted to enjoy our last team contest to the fullest.
As the final contest started, on 19th April, we started reading the problems and I configured the machine with our template etc. We had ideas for 3 problems in the first half an hour and we decided to implement the ones that were faster to code first. We got our first problem (problem B) accepted at around 50min. This was a slow start but we got it accepted in the first attempt so we were happy.
We went on to get problem K accepted at 62min. Now we had logic for two problems F and A. F was solved by a lot more people but it looked like heavy implementation so we decided to first go with problem A. We got problem A accepted, again in our first attempt, at 97 min.
By now we had 3 problems accepted with no penalties so it was going pretty good. I then implemented problem F and meanwhile the other two had logic for problem H as well. I submitted F and we got a TLE error. The constraints were huge and we were sure we had the right solution so I decided to look for constant optimizations in the code.
Meanwhile Vedant went on to implement problem H. We kept switching and I was submitting F with small changes and getting TLE again and again and Vedant kept going forward with implementing H. After about 5 TLE’s we finally got F accepted with constant optimizations at 166min. It was quite irritating but we maintained our calm and went on to get problem H accepted at 183min.
We were doing pretty good with 5 problem solved in 3 hours and were ranked 17th that time. In another 10 min we had logic for Problem I. The constraints were very tight and we thought whether we should think a bit more on how we can optimize the solution more but looking at 6s time limit we thought it should be fine and we should probably just go ahead and implement it. I started implementing it and Vedant and Rajas started thinking on next problem. The implementation was heavy and I was very calm and careful with it. Maybe I got a bit too comfortable and it took me around 1.5 hours to complete the implementation. As I uploaded the first submission at around 270min, the verdict sadly was TLE. That was the time when we got a bit anxious. Instead of changing the implementation to a faster data structure (with the same complexity though) we kept on trying constant optimizations and could not get it accepted till the very end.
Our final uncompressed rank was 35 and compressed rank was 31. We later got to know that the expected solution for problem I was same as what we had, but just a faster implementation in terms of constant factor. If we could have got that problem accepted, we would have been at rank 14 and been the Asia West champions. We could have also broken India’s best rank in the history of ICPC, which was rank 18 in 2012.
However, we did enjoy our experience. Maybe most other team would also have such a sad story of been unlucky with some problem. We would still say we were able to perform about 70-80% of our ability and hence we were more or less happy.
We were best among all Indian teams participating this year. In fact no other Indian team was able to solve 5 problems except us, which we had solved in first 3 hours itself. It was a pretty good experience overall.
Great effort TooWeakTooSlow. The entire IIIT-H community is proud of your accomplishment!