Dated:November 2007
Recently, I made a one week visit to IIT kanpur to participate in the south asian regionals ACM ICPC(International Collegiate Programming Contest) . Land of diversity, well, I never knew what it meant until I made this epic 3 days journey to kanpur, by train ofcourse. Did I expect to win or be the champion or bow to the grand accolade? No.. Not at all. It was simply not for me 
I was there to enjoy the change and I was never disappointed. Just thinking about the fact that I was there amongst the greatest and the brightest of programmers in India gives me goose-flesh.
If you aren’t already familiar with ICPC: its a contest where greatest of the programming community are challenged with tricky algorithmically-solvable problems. We can spend five hours to solve them all and guess what- we cracked 5 out of 7 and placed 13th , I know – its prime Check out the results in the ACM site. My coding practise in topcoder and mipt was definitely helpful in getting through some of the tricky problems . But we were hopeless struck in a maximum bipartite matching problem. The most painful part is that I could easily code the algo in a few minutes but it was the resolution into a standard algo problem that took the life out of us. Well, its the story with most of the problems. You never know what clues lay buried and what trap the problem setter has in store for you. Its all part of the fun and I have no trouble enjoying it!
Some day I plan to write a post about my brief but busy days with “contest-programming” during my college days. To me it was like riding a ferrari on a bumpless road: Exciting and mind-blowing at the same time. Coming back to my experience at IITK, the campus atmosphere was simply fantastic and students were like party animals: It was enjoyable eventhough its an understatement. The train journey was a little painful but we managed to survive long enough, to reach our homes. Now, I can easily spend 15 mins just thinking about the experience and smiling it to myself. Hope you enjoyed reading this blog. Check back for more on my sweetest experiences in life…. Thanks for glancing by.
