Pug’s Place

I don’t feel very good about the competition yesterday. I along with the other two guys on my team (and a lot of us who went down there) don’t feel that we did the best we could. My team placed 31 out of 77, the best UF team placed 14, and our worst was 41 (I think). Not a terribly bad showing of course, but nothing to brag about either. There were some difficulties:

1. Specific to me, I should have used C++. At our coach’s insistence I learned and used Java for all the practices throughout the semester and thus used Java yesterday. But I could have solved two more questions if I had only used C++ — I’m better with it, I’m faster with it, and the STL Vector would have saved me a lot of debug time with one particular problem (Java’s java.util.stack does not support random access or searches, so I had to create my own stack and had some problem with stack pointer corruption, ARGH!). Next year, I’m doing C++ no matter what. I’ve 11 more years experience with C++ than Java!
2. In general, we hammered algorithm design and mathematical solutions during practices over the past couple of months. Our four pounds of materials were all pre-written algorithms for complicated computing tasks. Every practice our coach gave us any sort of question he ran across except simulation questions, since they were ‘easy’ but just took a lot of time to design. Well, this competition all ten questions were simulation questions.

Sad, yeah, but such is life. I’ll know better next time, that’s for sure.