Round 1A
Of the three first rounds this was meant to be the easiest one to compete in for me. An 11 am start, a good breakfast, a reasonable amount of prep and reading up on my mistakes from the Qualification round. Oh and a running nose, chesty cough and head cold. Not that I wish to whinge, it was a fun round even with a resurgent cold.
To be honest I was hoping for more from myself. I entered the round thinking that I should try to get the small inputs down, and if I got stuck on one, move to the next to return later, after noting my thinking down in as brief a time as possible. As a strategy it was similar to what we used to do during A-levels, grab the quick marks, and then plod at the ones that require a bit of plodding.
The first problem was a nice straight forward read and code. I ran into the same problem as in the qualification round. It just took too long to run the large sample. The speed of the language might make a little difference, but the quality of my code on reading this morning was just poor.
The second problem was to optimize gain given a number of tasks in a day. I wasted a lot of time here through not reading the question carefully. Gain was the esoteric gain from doing the activity, not the energy gain, which was constant. Separating these two values led to me getting near to a solution. My solution was not however completed in time as I had at this stage moved onto problem 3.
Problem 3 was about finding potential factor combinations which would lead to finding cards. I took the approach that the highest value would most likely have factors which were cards. I almost had this down in code before I realized that I was running out of time and went back to problem 2.
In hindsight the strategy of giving oneself the thinking time as you move on to the next problem may have been better if I had finished either task 2 or 3. Effective headspace and time management were both to blame for a poorer than expected performance in this round, I might even blame the cold. Blame, however, may be the wrong word as its been a good learning experience, and fun to boot. I really should have taken up coding younger.
To be honest I was hoping for more from myself. I entered the round thinking that I should try to get the small inputs down, and if I got stuck on one, move to the next to return later, after noting my thinking down in as brief a time as possible. As a strategy it was similar to what we used to do during A-levels, grab the quick marks, and then plod at the ones that require a bit of plodding.
The first problem was a nice straight forward read and code. I ran into the same problem as in the qualification round. It just took too long to run the large sample. The speed of the language might make a little difference, but the quality of my code on reading this morning was just poor.
The second problem was to optimize gain given a number of tasks in a day. I wasted a lot of time here through not reading the question carefully. Gain was the esoteric gain from doing the activity, not the energy gain, which was constant. Separating these two values led to me getting near to a solution. My solution was not however completed in time as I had at this stage moved onto problem 3.
Problem 3 was about finding potential factor combinations which would lead to finding cards. I took the approach that the highest value would most likely have factors which were cards. I almost had this down in code before I realized that I was running out of time and went back to problem 2.
In hindsight the strategy of giving oneself the thinking time as you move on to the next problem may have been better if I had finished either task 2 or 3. Effective headspace and time management were both to blame for a poorer than expected performance in this round, I might even blame the cold. Blame, however, may be the wrong word as its been a good learning experience, and fun to boot. I really should have taken up coding younger.
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