Yet, every year, the Egyptian informatics teams make blogs asking for funding because their own people wont even give them the (relatively insignificant) amount of money needed to participate in IOI, EGOI, etc.

What do you mean? Do teams have to pay? I thought hotels are covered by ICPC (based on my experience).

It was announced during the last World Finals (Dhaka): link.

I thought they did a great job organizing it. The volunteers from Asia Pacific were super kind and thoughtful. They had ICPC posters on practically every single streetlight for miles, and held events in 3 different halls, with much of the main contest hall essentially built within a few days.

That said, personally I did have some safety concerns with just the way transportation works in general there. Roads rarely have lane lines, traffic rules are essentially "if you think you'll fit, step on the gas", and the amount of time it takes to get somewhere is essentially inversely proportional to how aggressive of a driver you are, with what felt like no limit. Unlike Porto and Moscow, I didn't feel inclined to tour the city or go for morning runs, and unfortunately if you were in a different hotel from the contestants, it was difficult to spend much time with them. The hotels were far apart and transportation was difficult, scary, and [imo] necessary.

I thought almost everything was good : hotel, organization, contest, food... The only problem I had was that we didn't have a single opportunity to visit the city. I find it quite sad to take the plane and travel to the other side of the planet just for a programming competition I could've done at home. On the other hand in Moscow we could visit pretty much every day which was great.

Honestly, I loved it! Comparing the Moscow finals and the Dhaka one, the former looks just half-assed (although I guess it's understandable given that icpc was willing to spend around the same amount of money). It felt like the organizers put their heart and soul into the event. I loved the concert with the local bands. The convention centre for the event was convenient enough (albeit missing wifi at times, which is a pretty minor issue :) ). Loved how passionate and hospitable the volunteers were, big props to them!

We explored the hotel surroundings for a couple of evenings, and that experience was truly priceless. I won't forget the traffic on the roads for a long time. Found a cute park nearby, went to a mall, to a market and to the poor area across the river :grimacing: Shocking but unique experience. I agree with nweeks that I wish we had more free time to explore, but at least we did have enough time to socialize. Was very happy to finally meet up with my online friends :ghosthug:

I'm out of attempts at this point, but these finals really made me wanna become a coach and attend some finals in the future in that role :)

Good: You can meet online friends. The event was well organized, especially if you consider the number of people. The covid-testing system was smooth. There were no issues with food and transport. It shows that the organizers are very experienced.

Bad:
1) Volunteers at the airport were the opposite of helpful. They kept telling everybody to "wait here", e.g. standing in the visa-on-arrival queues even if somebody didn't need it. I think that they actually didn't speak English. Departure from the hotel was bad too.
2) As always, extremely boring opening & closing speeches.
3) Loud traffic, audible even in a hotel room.

Neutral: It's a huge and expensive event where you stay at 5-star hotels. The splendor is arguably unnecessary.

Pros:

• The hotel we were in (Sheraton Dhaka) is honestly one of the best I've ever stayed at.
• The food served in the hotel is 10/10, the food served at the contest sites maybe 7/10, but overall, the food was more than alright.
• It is my first ICPCWF, so I was pretty amazed by the size of the event overall -- including the posters around the city, different halls it has been organized in, and generally the number of people, including volunteers, that were there to make this event as good as it was.
• The judge system (DOMJudge). It just worked flawlessly for the entire duration of the contest.
• Volunteers (apart from the ones at the airport), were very kind and respective, and they solved most of the queries we had.

Cons:

• Dhaka traffic. Honestly, I don't have a single good word to say about the buses that we have been driving around in, as well as for the overall state of the traffic. I know that this is not something ICPC can change, but they might take that into account while deciding where to organize the WF. Also, we did not get to explore the city at all, mostly as we had really no free time apart from the night time where the streets didn't look that safe.

• Arriving to Dhaka. The volunteers were opposite of useful, giving wrong information, making us wait in the queues we weren't really supposed to wait in, and their way of collecting the passports is, in easiest words, a bit shady. Also, leading us through the airport and finding our luggage was also something else. The funniest thing is that the volunteers, after a horrible services, asked for tips for their help throughout the airport.

• The contest itself honestly, there were just too many flaws for a competition that is that prestigious (it kinda lowers the value of all the organisation around it). In my opinion, there were $$$9$$$ problems that were doable by any decent team and the only thing making the difference is the speed -- which is not bad on its own, but what makes it bad is that most of the teams wasted lots of their time on one of the three non-minor flaws that the problems had:

  • Problem B: the complexity thing is just something that shouldn't be present at a WF -- if all the teams knew that the problem is solvable in $$$\mathcal{O}(QN)$$$, I bet that the number of solves would have at least been twice as high. The complexity needed to solve the problem should be easy to extract from the constraints, unless it's one of the problems where that is not the case (where that bit is actually the key of the problem). Many teams I've talked to were thinking of a better solution that the one that actually passes, which basically made them waste much more time (and maybe not solve the problem at all).
  • Problem G: we luckily didn't fall into this pit, but the important statement change was awfully announced to all the contestants. One more thing that must not happen at that high level.
  • Problem J: I don't know how many people fell here, but the samples with the statement combined is like if someone tried to intentionally screw with some teams, I have no other explanation for that.

• The speeches. It's insane how long and boring they were, in my honest opinion. That, along with some other stuff, made the 'whole day at the contest site', instead of giving us some more time to rest in the hotel, which I think that most of the contestants would have preferred.

Good:

• The volunteers, which were very helpful. Some other participants write that the ones at the airport were the opposite of that, but I didn't see anything wrong with them. Maybe we arrived at different times, and they were unfortunate to get bad volunteers?
• The concert on 7th — it was simply amazing. I've never been to concerts before, and this was one of the best events in my life
• A lot of opportunities to socialize with the other teams and staff
• Hotels — they were very good, and the food selection was just flawless (although it didn't stop me from going to the local KFC just to try it out)
• Huawei Challenge — in my opinion, this one was far more interesting than the strange neural network training in Porto
• Chill zone with more opportunities to socialize/play/solve some Kotlin tasks from JetBrains. The only thing that I felt missing is some big quest related to programming, like the way a Yandex Quest is organized during NERC — but I doubt we would have enough time to do that

Bad, but impossible to fix from the organizers' point of view:

• Traffic — it's just a giant clusterf**k, and I was almost run over by a vehicle twice

Bad and could be fixed, in increasing order of significance:

• Lack of sockets, especially in the hall where we wait for the contest and in the spectator zone during the contest itself
• PCR testing. I think the medic at Renaissance was just sadistic, it almost felt as if he was trying to reach my brain through the nose with the medical equipment. At least the queues for testing were very short, unlike in Moscow
• The contest itself (spoiler alert for those who are going to solve it, I will discuss the details of some problems):

• Incredibly long speeches during the Opening/Closing Ceremony, which even lead to them not fitting in the schedule
• Mohamed Fouad. At least he wasn't as prevalent as during the Moscow World Finals

Overall, it was a very nice experience for me, despite the not-so-short list of things I didn't like (some of them weren't really significant).

My overall experience was fairly positive, with the most negative aspects out of ICPC's control given the host city of the contest.

Good:

Choice of hotels and venue. The hotels were great and the venue fitting for the contest. We got by far the best hotel though in Westin, it was by far the closest hotel both to the airport and contest venue, so I could see others having a less stellar experience. The WIFI connectivity at the venue was poor to nonexistent.

In-person contest. This was my first in-person contest since 2018, so getting to meet other competitive programmers from around the world was great. The contest schedule did no good in this regard though, as before the contest you have other important things to focus on, and after it ended all teams already had to hurry to the airport. In the future, maybe placing an excursion day after the contest day would be nice.

Neutral:

The food. Anything with lentils in it was amazing, but the food available at the exhibition was very uninspiring with its poor imitation of US junk food. As a vegetarian, several times during the event I found myself eating just salad or steamed vegetables. Not only that, but during dress rehearsal the lunch provided was not the vegetarian option I had ordered, but tuna. Thankfully, this was fixed for contest day.

Bad:

TERRIBLE air quality. I wore two masks for most of the event, including the contest, and that actually didn't have anything to do with covid, it was just to make the air somewhat more tolerable to breathe. The top mask was visibly darker by the end of the event from all the smog caught in it. I am very surprised nobody else has mentioned this yet, as it in my opinion was by far the greatest drawback of the finals.

Extremely unsafe traffic. When we left the airport, I couldn't find the seatbelt, and when I asked about it, I was shown not where the seatbelt is (it didn't exist) but how to adjust the seat. This was a regular 7-person van, and that trip to the hotel had us overtaking an ambulance with sirens on. I've never seen such disregard for safety in traffic before, and I am not eager to see it again.

Covid safety. Many didn't follow the rules but nobody seemed to care. Not even hotel employees wore masks, and the elevator capacity limits were clearly impossible to fulfill with just 3 and no stairs available. I heard rumors of positive tests on the table of the testing room but no contestant tested positive. Overall seemed like they were going for illusion of safety rather than safety itself. The person doing the tests though did perhaps even too good of a job, that stick went very deep.

Issues with the problemset. Not going to repeat what everyone else is saying about the problemset, but in short B TL is too weak and G input size change is unacceptable. I did like problem I though.

Keyboard. Unlike the last three world finals, the keyboard available had the ANSI layout, not the international ISO one, and there was no opportunity to submit your own keyboard. This was a large issue for us, as the ANSI layout is missing the key used to write <>|, without which C++ is obviously impossible to use. In the end we got through with a dirty hack mapping caps lock to <> and using "or", "bitor" and "or_eq" in place of |.

Technical issues. During the Huawei challenge, the VS code C++ extension did not exist, which made my teammate learn CLion overnight and spend much of the dress rehearsal figuring out how to configure it. Thankfully, it turned out that the extension was supposed to be there, and it was added in time for competition day.

Mindnumbingly boring, repetitive and far too streched-out speeches. This seems like the standard now, but it would be nice if they would finally do something about it, especially with how many events went overtime. This issue was aggravated by the poor WIFI.