Oh boy, you wouldn’t think that after so many years hacking code, day after day, that I’d be beaten by high school students. Nonetheless, it happened…
This week, I got approached by Bernhard, a colleague of mine, whether I’d like to team up with him and participate in the NZ Programming Contest, as a staff team. And I thought, heck, why not? Recruiting another colleague, Mark, we had to decide on a name. After some brainstorming, we came up with AGP, which stands for almost grey power. Almost, since I lowered the age average below the necessary lower age limit for grey power. 🙂
Well, the day arrived and I finally knew a few more details about the contest:
- 1-3 people per team
- 1 computer
- 5 hours time
- 14 problems with varying degree of difficulty (4/3pts, 4/10pts, 3/30pts, 3/100pts)
We started with a trial run at 11am, with two simple problems. Thank god, the contest was taking place in the Linux lab and not in one of the Windows labs. Of course, using Eclipse, this doesn’t make much difference, but sometimes you wanna have an operating system with which you can do stuff… 😉 Having a testing expert, Mark, on the team, we had to implement unit tests with JUnit, of course. Was quite helpful later on during the grueling 5 hours…
I’ll spare you the details (started at 1pm, after an hour lunch break), but in the end we ended up with 9 points altogether, since we couldn’t submit a correct version of two 100pts and one 30pts problem. Oh well, it was definitely worth the fun, though we might prepare a bit next time!! In the end, we came second to last in the Waikato ranking. And yes, beaten by high school students…
[Update]
We received a price for coming last, half a dozen of cute little rubber ducks (yellow, of course)… 🙂