Hello, this is Egor. Today we are starting previewing some teams from ACM ICPC World Finals in Marrakech that, by my opinion, have most chances to win gold medals. First to go is Lviv National University team LNU Penguins.
Some trivia: Lviv NU participated just 2 times, but got gold one of those times, in 2008. One of participants of that team, Vasyl Biletsky, is current team's coach (but we should note that he actually was his own team's coach in 2008 as well).
This year team qualified to World Finals as winners of SEERC. They are currently 11th in OpenCup standings (do note, however, that there are many teams in that standing that are not ICPC eligible for one reason or another).
Roman Bilyi (TC: 2513, CF: 2672) participated in Russian Code Cup Finals in 2014 and won Bronze in Snarknews Winter Series 2015
Vitaliy Herasymiv (TC: 2206, CF: 2356) won Silver in IOI 2012
Bohdan Pryshchenko (TC: 2269, CF: 2348) won Gold in Snarknews Winter Series this year and Silver in Summer Series last year.
I believe this team has decent chance to clench gold, about 60%, while their chances to win are slim, about 1% or so.
Stay tuned for tomorrow as we will look at our next team from University of Zagreb!
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Why give you them only 1 % chance to be winners ?
Because reas ons
Perhaps you meant that probability of "just" medal is 60%? Of course they have chances for gold, but usually probability of performance at full strength on icpc final is much lower than 60%. Judging by their opencup results more reasonable prediction of gold will be 20-30%.
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There is exactly 2 WF teams ahead of them in OpenCup standings
Average number of golds between teams participating in opencup is less than 2.
But OpenCup coverage is rising. Anyway, I really think that 4 of 5 team I'll preview will get gold with pretty big probability
I am not so sure about it. Seems that you underestimate power of Сhinese teams.
and japanese teams :)
As a matter of fact I'll preview one of Japanese teams ;)
Teams from Shanghai Jiao Tong University got 3 gold medals during last 5 finals, including first overall place in 2010.
I found not a lot of contests where both teams from USA and teams from Europe participated. NAIPC2015 (and corresponding stage of OpenCup) is among recent ones; according to standings, team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology lost only to ITMO, while beating MSU (ITMO got 9/938, MIT got 9/1578, and MSU got 8/1055 in that contest).
I think both of those teams have a nice chances to fight for gold in case of solid performance.
Do you really think that they have a 60% probability to win a gold medal? Beyond the reasons, University of Zagreb and University of Tokyo are really strong.
They are. They have higher chances for gold for that reason
An easy exercise: if you sum up the chances of getting gold for all teams, what the result should be equal to?
Less then 400 for teams I'll preview, and it will be so
What's your secret of being so good in probabilities?
Take into account that expected total number of gold medals is higher than 4.00. It is possible that teams ranked #4 and #5 will show same (or very close) result and number of gold medals will be increased.
Was it ever a case that more than 4 gold medals were awarded even though there were no ties? This sounds very weird. And tie sounds very unlikely.
Five silvers were awarded in 2010 (places 5-9, bronze was awarded to places 10-13).
It's a funny story, through. During the opening cerenomy, when standard rules was announced and Q&A started, SPb SU team jokingly asked: "what if two teams solve same amount of problems with same penalty time?". Bill Poucher answered something like "there was some stupid rule, but this will never happen". It actually happened very soon. Both SPb SU and University of Warsaw solved six problems with 1042 penalty minutes. There was no tie, because there is 'last problem' rule, but fifth silver medal was awarded to SPb SU. Our coach (Andrey Lopation) likes to tell this story as an illutration to "impossible situations in real-life".
As a participant from mentioned team, I am also surprised by 60% prediction, looking at our team results during trainings and contests, and also at long list of strong participants of WF. I hope you know it better :)
Vitaliy is also participating in TopCoder, here is his profile.
Looking forward to see interesting previews of other teams :)
Thanks for Vitaliy's profile, I'll add that to infographics about your team for ICPC Live
I wouldn't underestimate teams from University of Warsaw and Jagiellonian University (Cracow). In previous week we had a polish training camp and both teams showed that they had done a big progress for last half of year, since CERC. My prediction is that they will win silver medals, possibly bronze, but I wouldn't be that much surprised if one of them will do unexpectably well. Take it into account when trying not to overflow 400% of summed probabilities for gold medals :P.
I saw some standings, there are a few very strong teams in both of those universities, other contestants should be happy that rules allow only 1 team from university to attend WF. BTW, same holds for some russian universities also :)
There is a question on Quora about favorites of WF 2015, you may share your thoughts there (and also look at prediction from I_love_Hoang_Yen).
UPD. Thanks to Swistakk for pointing out my mistake, it's nice to learn something new :)
Hah, concluding from the look of your answer, you said that UW and UJ are strong, but I thought that you are telling the opposite in the beginning, because you made a very subtle mistake in your English :D. There is at one time small and big difference between "few" and "a few". "A few" means "some" and has a neutral/positive meaning while "few" means "not many" and has a negative meaning, so at first glance it looked like you're telling that UW and UJ are in fact lame universities :pp.
Of course I'm not an authority when it comes to English corectness, but I just wanted to point that out, because that letter kinda changes meaning of whole comment, which is funny :P.
Just wanted to point out that if you want it to be very positive you can use "quite a few". Versatile word, isn't it? :D
I have written the extended version of review for LNU Penguins. Enjoy!
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