As it was online….. Any place where you could charge your laptop and access an internet connection was enough to participate in the contest. Thanks to L.P.U. for providing such a tech-enabled campus.
September 10, 2016 – It was not just another weekend at LPU. Students at the University had their minds immersed in deep algorithms and had all their problem solving skills put to action that night. Keeping all the party plans for the next week, coders and programmers decided to make take up some challenges on the weekend.
CYPHER, in association with CodeChef, had organised an online competitive programming contest for the students of the university. It was a 3 hour online coding contest which finally had its day after being actively promoted for a couple of weeks. As it was online, so there was no venue of the event. Any place where you can charge your laptop and have an internet connection was enough to participate in the contest. Participants were seen participating almost all places like their hostel rooms, library, study rooms, common rooms and open air pavements outside blocks 25,26,27,28 and 29 and also from their home(Day Scholars). Thanks to L.P.U. for providing such a tech-enabled campus. The contest was live from 1900hrs to 2200 hours. Students from all trades participated and tried to optimize their code as much as possible and run in the least time.
CYPHER had been promoting this event by dropping in relevant notifications to the emails captured through the online registration form, putting up announcements on the University Management System (UMS) and making announcements in the schools of Computer Science and Computer Applications. The organizing team also held a demo class to make the amateurs aware about the rules and regulations of the online competition environment of CodeChef. Finally on September 10, 1 hour before the contest was to begin, participants were given the link to the competition page and at 7 the link turned active.
The competition had 5 problems which had to be solved in the most optimized way. Each problem was a new challenge for the participants. The maximum time allowed for a submitted code to run was 1 second. Poorly typed codes got no chance to clear this barrier. The better algorithms were tested by the server live and the result was shown in no more than 10 seconds to the participants after a submission. The participant could then move on to the next problem or correct and resubmit the current code to clear this round.
Due to heavy traffic on the website, there were some issues as some of the participants could not login to their CodeChef accounts and thus were unable to participate. CYPHER was live on their facebook page taking all the queries and solving them as soon as possible. Later there was also an issue reported with one of the 5 problems, Prime of Primes, which CYPHER announced will be rectified soon.
After the contest was over at 2200 hours, the organisation dropped in mails to the participants and promised to present at least 1 such competition every month to help the students of the university update their skills in competitive programming, which is the demand of hiring tech giants. There was some useful reading material and docs mailed to the participants which contained some handy tips to competitive programming. And also they announced the discussion of the solutions to the problems to be held on September 14, 2016 from 1700 hrs onward at 34-102.
According to the official figures, there were 213 participants and 1462 submissions. CYPHER expects even more response in the contests which they are planning to conduct soon. To gather participants’ feedback, they’ve distributed the link to their google form, where they expect everyone to put in their valuable inputs so that they can improve future events.
