My experience with ICPC has been a wild ride! In this blog, I'll talk mainly about my experience at the World Finals in Dhaka, Bangladesh held in November 2022. This blog is divided into the following sections:
- Background (My story so far)
- Travel & Experience at Dhaka World Finals
- The actual contest
- Aftermath (Closing ceremony, thoughts, travel back)
Background
It's time to finally put my thoughts into words, and take a trip down memory lane...
When I joined college in my first year, everyone was talking about "Computer Science" and how it is the best major to go for. I didn't understand what the hype was about at the time, but it turned out that the courses left me craving for more. At the end of my first year, I learnt about a competition touted the "Olympics of Programming"; called the ICPC. When I read about it, I knew: I had to get there, at the biggest stage, and participate in this competition. My goal was to get to World Finals one day!
The way qualifications work in India is as follows: you participate in up to 2 regionals, and the top x teams from each regional qualify to World Finals (different regionals may have different quotas). Recently, there has been some innovation with the introduction of Asia West championships, where only the winners of regionals qualify and other top teams meet at a single contest to determine the other qualified teams.
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| I really took this to heart... (Context: click here) |
Cue many years of practice: blood, sweat and tears put together, my team finally qualified to represent my college (IIT Bombay) at the ICPC World Finals 2020 in Moscow by winning Amritapuri ICPC Regionals in December 2019! I even wrote a few blogs about it...
Unfortunately, in 2020, COVID-19 hit and affected most of the world. This severely impacted our motivation to grind and do well at World Finals, since it was indefinitely delayed. We got back to doing other things in life... but I never forgot about it. I had streaks (with 6-12 month long breaks in between) in which I competed, until at some point I hit one of my other goals in life - finally reaching Grandmaster on Codeforces, meaning I was about top 500 in the world, and top 10 in India amongst every contestant individually..
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| My profile when I hit GM for the first time! I finally got to remove the "Too Weak to GM" tag from my name. |
While waiting for World Finals 2020 to occur which was delayed indefinitely due to COVID, I started considering trying to qualify for another World Finals. Both my teammates for the Moscow World Finals did not want to do CP anymore, so I found two new teammates and participated in regionals. After a last minute AC on a nasty geometry problem, we qualified for World Finals 2021 by winning the Pune-Gwalior Regionals by a problem (
scoreboard link here).
Eventually, it was announced that ICPC World Finals 2020 would be held in Moscow, as planned... in November, 2021. Forget practice - there were far more pressing questions to answer! All of our lives - mine, Shriram, and Tushar's - had changed significantly since we last planned to go. I had accepted a Masters in CS offer from Stanford, and moved to the US in September 2021. Tushar moved to South Korea to work for Samsung. Thus, logistical issues took priority.
It turned out that neither Shriram nor Tushar could participate, and it was hard to acquire funding from our university for me to go with 2 replacements I found (though our coach, who was a professor I was working with on a research project, did try his utmost and has been consistently great about helping out with everything - thank you, Rohit!).
With these issues, I managed to get 2 replacements, Bhaskar and Shivam, who were also my teammates for the Dhaka (ICPC 2021) World Finals. Further, for funding my own travel to Moscow, I ended up testing, problemsetting and becoming contest admin for a few Codechef rounds.
Meanwhile, in my personal life, I had already started my Masters degree in Computer Science at Stanford in September 2021. This meant I had some additional logistics to figure out (getting Russian visas in the US as an Indian citizen..) and travel was made somewhat more difficult. Eventually, I managed to get on a flight and travel to Moscow.
Moscow was a one-of-a-kind scary experience in my life in many ways; as soon as I landed at 2am, I got notified that both of my teammates had gotten COVID and were taken to some other ward. After reaching my hotel at 3:30am and getting the full story, it turned out that Shivam had gotten a positive COVID test and was taken away, while Bhaskar was asked to isolate in the room both of them were sharing.
After many scuffed days, Bhaskar was allowed to participate on the day of the contest, and we achieved the best rank IIT Bombay has gotten to date: 33rd tied (our rank with tiebreaks was 37th), solving 6 problems; and we did it in a team of 2! It was a really good feeling, and left us motivated for Dhaka WF. Meanwhile, I also met some of my CP idols, which was amazing!
Left: Me and Bhaskar w/ Mike, creator of Codeforces Middle: Me with tourist (Gennady Korotkevich), best competitive programmer in history
Right: Me with Um_nik (Alex Danilyuk), one of the best competitive programmers, winner of World Finals 2022, and at the time my co-coordinator at Codechef
Another cool aspect of World Finals is meeting all your programming friends from over the world! We had an AC discord meetup, but I'll skip posting those pics as I have better ones now...
Historically, one can only participate in World Finals up to 2 times, to allow for more diversity in participants. However, after Moscow World Finals, we got the news that Moscow would not count as a World Finals participation for the purpose of the criteria, since it was held in a COVID year (and thus some teams could not participate). This meant that I could qualify yet again...
A fellow incoming Stanford student Lucas Xia reached out to me on discord, asking me if I would want to form a team with him to contend from Stanford for another World Finals. I decided that I was in, and we completed our team with Konstantin Miagkov, a PhD student in Math. We ended up doing pretty well in the North American circuit, qualifying to NAC in May 2022, and coming 11th there. This result allowed us to qualify for the World Finals to be held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt 2023. Maxwell wrote a cool blog on the NAC experience here and Alex made a nice video on NAC here.
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| Card games were a big theme of NAC 22 |
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| The Stanford team, in order front to back: Lucas, Konstantin, Me |
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| In-contest pic |
Since we qualified to World Finals through NAC, this confirmed my qualification to 3 World Finals with 3 completely different sets of teammates: Shriram & Tushar for Moscow World Finals, Bhaskar & Shivam for Dhaka World Finals, and Lucas & Konstantin for Egypt World Finals. A truly unique and weird achievement...
Travel & Experience at Dhaka World Finals
After NAC, I took a break from Competitive Programming until October, when me, Lucas, Konstantin, and Andy (our Stanford coach and a PhD student here) decided to run a larger iteration of the Stanford ICPC club. Teaching at club meetings reignited some of my passion again, but there was a slight problem: the ICPC rules state that every team gets a single computer. Me, Bhaskar and Shivam had not met each other for over a year in-person, and we had never done a one-computer contest together! Indeed, due to COVID, ICPC had allowed 3 computers for the previous season; therefore, even at the start, we knew that this world finals was going to be a gamble. We were not used to debugging on-paper, reading each other's code, and maximizing computer time as a team. There was no ideal way for us to practice this (and not too much motivation), so we decided to just wing it. Getting funding was something we had given up on based on our experience last year, and thankfully by this point all of us had enough saved for the trip due to having jobs.
Finally, it was time to leave for Dhaka! I travelled with Lucas (who had qualified from UCLA, his undergraduate institution) and we had flights through Dubai. Since our seats were far away, we tried to use the in-flight calling feature on Emirates; but sadly, it didn't work very well 😖. At Dubai, we met the UCLA coach Professor David Smallberg, who got us into a nice lounge at the airport. We got some rest and free food; what more could we ask for? 😋
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| Before the harrowing 24 hour journey |
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| Chilling @ lounge in Dubai |
After a long journey, we finally made it to Dhaka... only to be greeted with a 2-hour long line for immigration. After finally getting through, we were given a grand welcome - some ICPC official took us through a different entrance and separate security, where we were barely checked and immediately made it outside. We then waited for the bus with what seemed like 20-30 volunteers; almost as many as people arriving on flights (maybe I exaggerate a bit, but...). Some of the volunteers tried to take selfies with the (foreign-looking) participants; South Asians reading this blog will understand the tendency of locals here to treat foreigners as celebrities. Unsurprisingly, no volunteer wanted to take a photo with me, since they thought of me as a local; clearly, my American façade needs a lot more work.
Everyone then split into different buses to go to their respective hotels, which was an unfortunate part of this World Finals in my opinion. The hotels were assigned based on the region, and so I was separated from all my US/NAC friends, and sent to a hotel with the other South Asian teams (which was the farthest from the venue, and most inconvenient by far). On the way there, I noticed that a lot of banners for ICPC were present throughout the city... I really felt like a celebrity! On arriving at the hotel, we took a COVID test, and were handed a SIM card and some other helpful items. I then realized changing to the latest iPhone right before WF wasn't the best idea: I didn't have a physical SIM card slot, and thus I had no way to contact anyone...
After settling into my hotel room, meeting my teammates after forever and getting dinner, I did what any reasonable person would do: host a poker game and invite all the teams for a meet-and-greet! It was tremendous fun; I was seeing some of these people in person after 3+ years, and meeting online friends for the first time.
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Poker night in our team's room
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| Since we were playing no-cash, people kept requesting more money; I allowed it as long as they waited a game out and requested powers of 2, until we reached a ridiculous end... |
After a fun game that lasted a few hours, we ended things before midnight and got up fresh in the morning, ready for team registration! I pleaded to my teammates to please not get COVID this year, so that we could actually have a 3-person team compete.
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| Opening ceremony-ready! Left to right: Shivam, me, Bhaskar |
Heading to the registration, I was excited and nervous to meet the rest of the AC/kbr (discord servers) gang! We decided to meet around lunch; unfortunately, seating for groups wasn't great, so we just got some chairs and a couple of sofas together, and finally caught up with each other. As usual, everyone is way shier in-person compared to online...
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| Playing carrom after a long time! Bhaskar lost, though he will strongly deny it on enquiry |
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| kbr meetup!! We got cute plushies too😋 |
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| AC meetup! Pajenegod (holding the Blåhaj) proceeded to steal Kuroni's plushie by submitting it as KTH's mascot, which was a hilarous misunderstanding |
We played a quick couple games of Secret Hitler on a makeshift table (ie, a chair, since there existed no tables), but I was distracted the whole time - my registration time was coming up soon, and my teammates were waiting for me (sorry, KTH folks, for throwing your guesses off by irrational play)! After finishing the game, I ran down and met my teammates - who, as it turns out, were engaged in a competitive game of table tennis. I stepped in for Bhaskar to cover for his abysmal play, but rushed the game anyway to not be late.
As it turns out, we made it to registration well before time! While checking in our documents, I realized I brought my proof of enrolment for Stanford.. but I was participating from IIT Bombay 🤡. Yes, the ICPC years being shifted so much had even participants confused whom they were representing...
After quickly fixing these issues, we went through the other registration desks, where one of the ladies said "hey, you're that guy who participated alone last year!". I guess I was memorable; I have to say, the memories were definitely meme-worthy! She was glad I had a team this year, and hopefully she'll remember me next year as well. We did the team picture, and were confused about what to do for the team video; we ended up doing three different things, with me doing a thinker like last year, Shivam doing the "cool guy hairflip", and Bhaskar being generally confused about the camera being turned on.
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| My meme team photo at Moscow World Finals |
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| Finally, a 3-person team! Though it's complete chaos this year... |
After team registration, we realized there was a large break until the cultural program. With all of us being out of practice, we decided to take a cab back to our hotel and get up to speed on stuff we didn't remember. Though we were rusty, we still considered ourselves as relatively decent contenders; both me and Bhaskar had been Grandmaster before on Codeforces, and Shivam was Master (though he didn't participate at all, so I guessed he was likely stronger). We got in some good practice, and got a good night's sleep for the ICPC Challenge and Opening Ceremony the next day.
The next morning, we entered the ICPC Challenge (a heurestic contest, with prizes for top 12 ICPC teams) with no game plan in mind. I was the only one on our team who had done heuristic contests before, and I hadn't done particularly well on them, with a 56th rank in Hashcode 2021 being my best achievement. We decided that I would code at the start, and then we would see how it went.
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Getting ready for the ICPC Challenge
 | | Post ICPC Challenge meet-up! |
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It took me 30 minutes to get the code up and running for the basic greedy solution, and surprisingly it actually passed the samples (I'm not known for writing the most bug-free code...). On submitting, we got an alright but not-too-high score. Since my teammates had no experience reading my code, we decided that my code was impossible to read and I would be the only one who would code for the entire contest. After many ideas from my teammates, fixing a bug in my solution, and a ton of hardcoding constants and optimizing over testcases, we ended at 22nd place amongst ICPC teams; not a bad result at all! Considering our lack of preparation (me writing python scripts on the fly, no template code for automatically running scorers and saving best solutions, and unfamiliarity with heuristic contests), this result was a pleasant surprise and made me feel hopeful about our form. In particular, I was quite happy with how quickly I managed to implement things without making too many errors.
Following the ICPC Challenge, we had the opening ceremony, which had some fun performances. Unfortunately, like any respectable opening ceremony, we had some long, boring speeches in the middle as well. Not wanting to listen to them, I decided to get a bit creative; I downloaded some 2-player games on my iPad, and challenged my teammates to 1v1 me. In what would become the recurring theme of the trip, Bhaskar ended up losing a vast majority of games (don't let him convince you otherwise!). After the too-long opening ceremony, we made the 1+ hour trip back to our hotel and ended up practicing for a bit.
A Opening Ceremony dance!
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Bhaskar proudly posing after his loss to me in a General Knowledge quiz. The scores left me feeling quite concerned...
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Team pic on the big screen!
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The next day was the Dress Rehearsal, which was mostly without incident. A bunch of us ended up playing Avalon, where I managed to get a pic with Errichto; and I got some souvenirs from Saratov SU from pikmike. That reminds me that I really wish souvenir exchanges were a bigger thing at ICPC; I tried doing this last year (I gave people Stanford golf balls), but it didn't really catch on. Maybe in Egypt I will try to arrange something well in advance...
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| Meme-worthy Indian teams during the practice contest |
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| Saratov SU merch |
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| Avalon time! |
After the dress rehearsal, I managed to get an extra 3 lunches from the organizers; my teammates, who were starving for more food, were very appreciative of this. In the evening, I decided to skip practicing with my teammates (who were planning on doing some individual practice) and work through problems with the IIT Kanpur team instead. I showed them a couple of cool flow construction problems I came across recently, and worked through my personal set of practice problems I like to go through before major contests.
Finally, it was D-day. The contest we were all waiting for! We woke up early, took the bus, and reached the contest hall way before the scheduled time. We reached so early, that there was really only one reasonable thing to do: play poker! Since we didn't have a set, we played completely online this time. Our game was interspersed with interesting comments from Bill Poucher, who was going around and entertaining us with random facts about teams.
Finally, we entered the contest hall, and the World Finals countdown started. After going through the usual routine of "Don't touch anything" and "Let's speed up the countdown timer", the ICPC World Finals officially was underway!
Our contest strategy was as follows: I was at the computer first, and coded some boilerplate template code we would all need. Meanwhile, the other two read problems to find the easy ones. I ended up reading from the start, and problem C struck me as an interesting one. I worked on the math on paper; meanwhile, Bhaskar realized that H was not too hard, and started coding it. Around 15 minutes in, many teams already had AC on H, but some had WA; it was clearly a tricky problem in some way.
Meanwhile, I had figured out the solution to C was some bruteforce check; the constraints having n atleast 6 was a clear give-away, and the rest was simply figuring out some divisibilities. Unfortunately, the lack of practice had made me underconfident in my solution. Meanwhile, Shivam had solved J on paper. I realized that my solution meant I would require some kind of way to avoid overflow, so I asked Shivam to quickly follow my logic and make sure I wasn't missing something; Bhaskar was still using the computer, so I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to implement something incorrect next. Shivam agreed with all my claims, and I decided that the best way forward was to use Python; though I had never used it in an official contest before! Meanwhile, I started reading the other problems; I went through B, E and H, both which seemed approachable.
Bhaskar submitted and got WA on H. He wasn't sure what was wrong, so we printed his solution and I took over and coded the solution to C in Python; it took me a few minutes to figure out the code, but I managed to finish and pass the samples. We submitted, and the worst case scenario happened: we got another WA. I gave up the computer to Shivam to do J, and me and Bhaskar were debugging our specific problems.
While Shivam was halfway through J, Bhaskar figured out the "trap" in H, and took over and recoded his solution. Meanwhile, I figured out that my mistake was simply not exiting the while loop correctly; I have no idea how it passed the samples... I spent a couple more minutes ensuring I was not making a mistake, took over the computer, fixed this, and got our first AC at 74 minutes into the contest! Bhaskar finished his last few lines for H, submitted, and we got our second AC at 77 minutes. Subsequently, Shivam took over, and got AC with a few more lines; we had our third AC at 89 minutes. Things were looking good again!
At this point, the official stream tells me we were 9th on the scoreboard. I already knew how to solve L, so I took over while my teammates figured the other problems out. L seemed to just be a brute-force; and with my current form, I believed I could do it without taking too much time. While I was coding L, Shivam managed to come up with a solution to B, and Bhaskar came up with a solution to F. This meant I had to code quickly and accurately; however, keeping in mind that we had no practice with 1-computer, I was very concerned about how much time we were wasting there. In my mind, both my teammates were not the fastest typers, and they were debugging on the computer; therefore, I wanted to debug on paper as much as possible. With this rush in mind, after coding L and not matching samples, I immediately gave up the computer to Bhaskar for F.
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| We had a decent lead early in the contest |
I went through my code carefully for a while, and found a few bugs; I kept taking over the computer until I managed to get the same expected number of steps as the sample. However, my starting coordinates did not match! It took me a while to realize the whole coordinate system was shifted; after taking another 15 minutes and fixing this, everything seemed to be perfect and I submitted; only to get a WA! 😐
Meanwhile, Shivam had solved G as well, and we had 4 problems queued at this point: F, G, B, L. I could not figure out my mistake in L, and I insisted on not using the computer to debug, which was a huge mistake. After spending forever trying to debug L, I decided to try to explain my code to Bhaskar once he was done and try to solve other problems meanwhile instead. I thought about problem A for a bit; meanwhile, Bhaskar finished F and got AC at 179 minutes. This pushed us to 17th place, with 3 more problems to go!
Shivam took over to code B; meanwhile, I explained my idea of L to Bhaskar. Since we had no experience reading each other's code, it was very hard for him to read my code for L. I suggested him re-coding it, but he said it was unlikely to pass if he did, since he would do the same thing as I did. At this point, I was desperate for an AC; I decided to simply re-code my own solution in a different way, bringing the complexity down from O(n^2m^2) to O(nmk), where n, m represent the rows and columns, and k represents the number of markers.
Having decided this, me and Bhaskar decided to work on problem A together, to hopefully get to 8 problems (if we managed to get B and G, and I fixed L). Looking back, this was a mistake. After Shivam got an initial wrong answer on B, I coded another solution to L, and got another wrong answer. Meanwhile, Bhaskar had solved A, and we let him take over to code A. He spent 5 minutes coding it, and at this point we had 30 minutes left in the contest. He realized that it would take him the entirety of the 30 minutes to finish!
We decided to give up on A, and try to finish B and L if possible. Shivam realized he had missed a few cases in B, and spent time adding those cases. Meanwhile, I was looking for everything possible in L; were my arrays too small? Would I fail on small test cases? Did I not output with good enough precision? Did I take the input incorrectly? Was I printing the output incorrectly? (The problem asks to sort by y-coordinate first, which was unusual).
After changing as many parameters in L as I could between Shivam's debugging of B, we got WA on both until the end of the contest. Team morale was at the lowest it had ever been. We knew what we just did; took a successful contest performance, and threw it down the drain. Overall, there were a lot of mistakes made that future ICPC teams should learn from. Here, I list the lessons we learnt:
- After I could not understand what was wrong with L, I should have just insisted that someone else code it from scratch. It is a fairly easy problem, and probably I had missed something that someone else would now.
- I insisted too much on not using the computer to debug; maybe my L failed on small test cases or the maximum case trivially, but I only checked this on paper. I realized later my anxiety of using too much computer time led me to completely bomb the contest.
- We should never have started thinking about A. At that point, it should have been only between B, G and L. To be fair, all we cared about were medals, and we knew we needed 8 problems at least, which led us to this moonshot decision.
- Teammates should always be able to read and understand each other's ideas. This would have made our debugging much faster on B and L.
To my teammates credit, no one blamed me for our terrible, terrible performance. I felt seriously depressed because I had bombed a problem I should be solving in my sleep in one of the most important contests of my life. I know I hadn't prepared for it, but I wanted to go out on a problem I didn't know how to solve; I had no large regrets (apart from not having 1/3rd of our team present, which I could do nothing about) in the Moscow World Finals because we got AC on everything we were able to solve. This World Finals was filled to the brim with regret; Solving 8 problems on paper was completely useless, since we only got AC on 4.
After the contest,
timreizin told me that
SecondThread talked about me on stream, which was cool. The video at the correct timestamp is
here. The idea was that the commentators would tell the audience cool facts about the participants, and I want to talk a bit more about Bhaskar's cool fact. I know him since 8th grade, and this is Bhaskar's 4th different field in which he has reached world championship level; previously, he had golds in Junior Science Olympiad, Physics Olympiad, and he was 3rd in the world in U-12 Chess championships... Additionally, he's quite humble and even Shivam didn't know this fact until I told him. What a genius!
Aftermath
I was too depressed to happily talk to anyone after the contest. Aryan from IIT Kanpur came over and let us know that his team had solved 5 problems (they had 3 before the freeze, and at some point we had AC on 4 problems to their 1 problem); other teams were similarly happy or sad, but everything seemed as if it were in black and white.
"Well", I thought, "atleast we missed medals by a lot - not by just a little, right?". Oh, how wrong I was. In the closing ceremony, as expected, the resolver showed that we were the top team on 4 problems (which means that we were the fastest to solve 4 problems, which is a bad thing; any team that solved 4 problems as fast as us got atleast one more). We ended up on rank 50; atleast we made the top 50, right?
Well, it turned out that IIT Kanpur was the 49th team (ie, the last team on 5 problems); and the resolver stopped. When it finally dawned on our team what was happening, we realized we made a huge mistake; by throwing our contest so hard, we missed becoming Asia West champions, instead giving it to IIT Kanpur. This moment was the most bittersweet of the whole trip; IIT Kanpur was the team I was closest to, and even trained with on the last day, but I would have wished they were champions by more than 1 rank. The difference was way too small, and our throwing way too bad to feel good for them in the moment.
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| IIT Kanpur, Asia West Champions! |
Now that I've had time to process our (mostly my) mistakes, I'm super happy for the team, and for Aryan in specific. He has been one of my longtime closest friends, and I've teamed with him for fun contests many, many times. I know how hard he's tried to make it to World Finals; failing every time because of a stronger team from his college. He was able to come due to a miracle: one of the original team members from IITK could not participate anymore, so Aryan was able to take his place, and show us what he's made of. Thus, aryanc403 has become Asia West champion without ever qualifying for World Finals; all I can say is orz!
Other results of note are: UCLA is 34th (Lucas's team did extremely well! They are tied 26th), Purdue comes 20th (tied 16th; Kuroni was extremely sad about missing another problem, but thankfully they would not have medalled even if that were AC due to worse penalty; hopefully that makes the pain lesser), KTH is 13th, barely missing medals 😔. To the surprise of no one, MIT ends up winning; however, they do not AK (all-kill) the set, since they do not get AC on D, a geometry problem.
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| MIT wins Dhaka World Finals |
After the closing ceremony, me and Lucas rush to get to a bus to the airport as soon as possible. On the bus, somehow the topic of wildcard matching comes up, and I tell Lucas how to do it with FFT (something I've seen on cp-algorithms
here a long time in the past). Later, someone tells me this is directly related to problem G, which is sad since I didn't get to read it.
On reaching the airport, we meet none other than... the MIT team (specifically, Mingyang and Jerry from the team, and Ce Jin, their coach)! We briefly wonder how they will get all of their plaques, cup and medals to the US (duh, of course MIT will pay for the extra bag...). It turns out we have the same flight to Dubai; therefore, we end up getting dinner together and then playing card games at the terminal, waiting for our flight. At the Dubai airport, we realize we all have a lot of time to kill; Me, Jerry and Lucas roam around to get some souvenirs for friends back home (I couldn't get any cool ones at Bangladesh! 😓. I settle on some cool candles I see at the airport. Meanwhile, Mingyang is working on his biology homework for a class at MIT.
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| Souvenir candles I got for friends! |
After some shopping, we meet up again to get some games of poker going. Lucas gets a particularly memorable play; he flops quads and then Jerry hits the full house on the river! Both of them naturally call all-in, and the result is hilarious.
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| Lucas flops 4 of a kind, beating Jerry's full house! |
After a few games, me and Lucas decide to use our non-existent, long-forgotten biology knowledge to assist Minyang in speed-running his biology pset. As thanks for our rusty memories of the Rough Endoplasmic Reticulum having Ribosomes, he lists us as collaborators on his pset (I'm sure we did more damage than help, though...). We get a final picture with the MIT team before they head to their flight.
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Mingyang showing off the results of our hard work (?) on the pset
From left to right: Me, Lucas, Minyang, Ce Jin, Jerry |
It turns out that we played around for too long, and the MIT team is barely in time to make their flight. Me and Lucas have a bit more breathing room, getting on our last flight of the journey. With the end of a long trip looming, both of us are energized and we promise to do much better on Egypt World Finals next year. On the flight back, we play various games; we learn how to play Yahtzee through trial and error (highly recommended fun game of priors and posteriors!), and while Lucas whoops me most times, I manage to get the high score.
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| Yahtzee high scores |
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| Extremely tired on the way back! |
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Like a true software engineer, I manage to break the in-flight entertainment system
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As we make our way back to Stanford, I realize that I only have one last shot left at ICPC World Finals. I guess I'll have to make the next one count; it's the only one I have where I'm able to practice with teammates somewhat before the contest. The end of my CP career is near, and Dhaka reminded me what CP means to me. Come next year, hopefully I'll go out with a bang.
In other news, my ICPC zoo has grown larger! Hopefully next year I'll be able to add cats to the mix...
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| My cute lil ICPC zoo! |
