First day

We have North America Championship from today (May 23rd) to May 28th in Orlando, Florida. This competition is for choosing the teams qualifying to ICPC WF 2024 in Kazakhstan.

I will make a vlog for each day. I'm trying to make each one of these vlogs 15 mins. My first try wasn't very successful and the first video is about half an hour. (It was good and I couldn't trim more than this)

By the way, we did the real duel with galen_colin and we tried to headshot each other using frisbees. We are both alive but injured.

Everyday, This post will be updated by the vlog of that day. Hope you'll enjoy, feel free to give me suggestions about the next ones. And definitely wish UMD White luck :)

Second Day

I heard a sad news from Mohamed Bakry today. As he said, Iran and Israel cannot attend IOI 2024 onsite and this is told to them about a year ago. I personally don't know what can we do in this situation to prevent such things to happen again.

I also had a short talk with ecnerwala today. Then, we participated in the practice round today. We got the second rank, after MIT. They solved 7, we solved 6, the next teams (Waterloo and Stanford) solved 5.

There was a lot of fun back in the hotel too. Many hilarious things happened.

Third day

Everything was very similar to the second day. We had another practice round. We did not perform well in this one. I also met and had a short talk with SecondThread. Again, we had most of the fun back in the hotel.

Fourth Day

we had dress rehearsal round. It was basically training all the rules of the main contest with a practice round. We won it. Problems were super easy and some of them were from the previous rounds, so this does not mean anything. However, even winning meaningless competitions doesn't feel bad.

There was another round, NSA challenge. We performed poorly in it. The contest was not very good either (was not very competitive programming-ish). We got the 7th place.

Have you heard about link-cut tree? Today, I met its inventor, Professor Daniel Dominic Sleator. I recorded a short talk with him.

I also had a very short talk with our rival, MIT team. (djq_cpp, TLE, and duality) The scary fact about them is that the max rating of all of them is around 3300 ~ 3400. So, we can simply give up the first rank and fight for the second one.

The big day is tomorrow. You can watch the livestream on ICPC official YT channel. It seems like it has some cool features. Each team has a dedicated camera, and you can comment the name of a team to see them, and they will show that team to you. (You can see what they are doing at that moment) It seems cool.

We don't have any Chinese team member. So, wish us luck, we need that!

Fifth Day

We had our contest on the fifth day. We were not at our best, however, we won some very valuable awards. We got:

Qualified to World Final 2024, Astana, Kazakhstan, NAC Bronze Medal, South division, J first accept, $7500 ($3000 for bronze, $3000 for winning South, $1500 for J first accept)

As expected, MIT won the gold medal.

Yeah, now we need to train to get in shape better. Because we need to be at our best in the WF.

Final Day

The contest is over, and in the final day, we decided to go to Disney World. Actually, it was more fun than expected. You can watch this final vlog in the link provided below.

It's over, and now we have to get ready for the next challenge. This is the last update of this blog. Thank you for following!

Videos

Day #1 (Coming to Florida and settling in)

Day #2 (Iran cannot attend IOI 2024, Short Talk with ecnerwala, Practice Round, Missing Frisbees)

Day #3 (Career Fairs, Second Practice Round, Short Talk with SecondThread)

Day #4 (Winning Dress Rehearsal Round, Talk with Link-Cut Tree Inventor)

Day #5 (Won Bronze and South)

Day #6 (I Rode an Ikran! | Many Disneylands, but One Disney World!)

Photos