rng_58's blog

Code Festival 2016: New Onsite Contest with Free Trip for Finalists!
By rng_58, history, 8 years ago, In English

We announce a new international onsite competition: Code Festival 2016. The contests will be held on AtCoder.

The top 20 foreign (non-Japanese) university students are invited to the Finals in Japan. (Even if you are not a student, you can participate in qualification rounds and parallel rounds of onsite contests. All of these contests are rated.)

The flight tickets and hotels for finalists are paid by organizers.

There will be three qualification rounds. Top 10 foreign students from round A and top 5 each from round B and C will qualify for the onsite contest.

Also, there will be many interesting events during the onsite competition.

More detailed information can be found at the official website.

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8 years ago, # |
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Could all unicode characters classified as letters be allowed by the registration page ? I need to use the characters é,É and ë. (strangely, LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH DIAERESIS is not accepted, but CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER IO is accepted).

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    Please use 'e' instead (or whatever method you use to convert your language into English).

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    In fact, all Cyrillic and Greek characters are supported in traditional Japanese character sets called "Shift-JIS", while other European special characters such as é aren't supported. It seems the registration page uses the out-of-date character set instead of UTF-8.

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8 years ago, # |
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Hmm, why university students only? It reminds me of VK Cup..

And why it is 10 — 5 — 5 for each round?

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    Sorry but this rule was decided by the sponsor (maybe the reason is similar to VK).

    If we assign the same number to all rounds, rounds B/C will be easier to qualify (because some of top people have already qualified from round A in round B/C).

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8 years ago, # |
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Must be a student (technical college 4th or 5th year, technical college specialist course, vocational school, junior college, university, graduate school), or have graduated within the last four years but not yet in employment.

Note: Those who have done only part time work are regarded as not yet in employment.

So not only students :)

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8 years ago, # |
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Are high school students appropriate?

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    Sorry, high school students are not eligible for the onsite competition.

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8 years ago, # |
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Where will the rounds be hosted? On Codeforces?

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8 years ago, # |
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Does "graduate school" include PhD students?

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    It typically does, yes.

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    And does "graduate school" include old PhD students? =)

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      8 years ago, # ^ |
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      Probably it should... although the registration form maxes out at 1990 :)

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      8 years ago, # ^ |
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      There's no age limit. If you were born before 1985 (it seems they extended it), please choose 1985.

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        8 years ago, # ^ |
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        By the way, for some reason you can choose 2021 for your birth year.

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    Yes, PhD students are eligible.

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8 years ago, # |
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The second-last question in the registration form seems broken.

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8 years ago, # |
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Are students who also work or worked (fulltime) allowed to participate?

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    Sorry, full-time workers are not eligible for the onsite competition. However, part-time workers are eligible.

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      8 years ago, # ^ |
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      That sounds strange. In all places during the registration process it was stated that you should be a 4th/5th year student OR a part-time employee, I believe it clearly means that being an employed student is ok. What's the idea behind excluding everybody who has worked full-time, or is currently working, even though they are students?

      Also an interesting question is about the full-time internship, doest it count as an employment?

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        8 years ago, # ^ |
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        Could you ask rhd_procon at r.recruit.co.jp with your detailed situation?

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      8 years ago, # ^ |
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      So, I've asked organizers what is the final status on students who work full-time for the same time. The answer is: you are eligible if you mainly belong to a university, and it is ok for you to work (even for full-time) in a company.

      The confusing "full-time workers are not eligible" part actually means the following: organizers do not want to invite full-time workers who already got their university degree and still visiting university for an extra education.

      Quote from their answer (in my case $COMPANY_NAME is Yandex):

      In other words, you will be not eligible if you are a $COMPANY_NAME employee who are taking part of university courses for further study.

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8 years ago, # |
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Right now I can't answer questions about eligibility. I will ask organizers.

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8 years ago, # |
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Judging from past two year's Code Festival contests, these qualification rounds and some of the just-for-fun contests at onsite event might be easier than ARC (and AGC, needless to say). Will it be rated for all contestants? Or will it be unrated if I have higher rating (ex: more than 2800)?

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    Rated for everyone. (Of course we'll add harder problems. It will be a tragedy if we choose 20 finalists by last year's difficulty.)

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8 years ago, # |
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If I'm too old to get the trips, do I need to register at Code Festival website, or just having AtCoder account is enough?

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    You are too employed as well

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    Just having AtCoder account is enough.

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8 years ago, # |
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Top 20, seems the dream is far from me :(

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8 years ago, # |
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Round A is tomorrow, right? There is no corresponding round in AtCoder schedule.

Duration will be 100/110 minutes?

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    I'll post a new thread about Round A soon. The contest is tomorrow and the duration is 120 minutes.

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8 years ago, # |
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I'll share my experience with Japan and Code Festival here.

I arrived in Tokyo one day before most other contestants. I was greeted by snow — the first November snow in Tokyo in 54 years, according to my lovely guide. I arrived at the hotel a few hours before the check-in time, so I had plenty of time to walk around Ginza (and freeze to death, since I packed according to the very mistaken weather forecast). All the stereotypes about Japan are true — if you walk along a (sparkling clean) street for a few minutes, you'll see plenty of Sushi restaurants, karaoke bars, pachinko casinos and sex shops.

In case you ever ate Sushi outside Japan: that's not what sushi is supposed to taste like. There are dozens of different fish on the menu, they all look approximately the same and taste completely different. It's delicious, and quite cheap — a 2100 Yen meal at Sushizanmai was enough to fill me. If you want something even cheaper, there are many "fast food" establishments where you can order at a machine and receive your food instantly for about 700 Yen — I had some Tempura and Udon, also delicious. If you like playing with your food, you can try Monjayaki — it is something like an omelette with dozens of ingredients that you can chop and fry by yourself and eat directly from the stove. A word of warning: there are no forks.

Despite Tokyo being popular with tourists, most locals don't speak English. The password you need to say is "Eigo ga hanasemasu ka", and the answer you'll usually get is "a little", which basically means "no", even from restaurant and shop staff. Hotel receptionists speak some English, but are generally far from fluent.

Technology is everywhere — I already mentioned the food ordering machines at restaurants, but the hotel rooms also contain air conditioning, air cleaning and air humidifying devices with no less than 16 buttons, labeled only in Japanese. I'm pretty sure the average Japanese toilet seat has more computing power than my laptop.

I will have to stay at 4 different hotels, including one for two non-consecutive nights, for a grand total of 5 check-ins/check-outs. (EDIT: +1 hotel count)

The official program was well-organized and the staff was extremely helpful and polite. The problems of the main contest were as fun as you would expect from atcoder. There was also an entertainment program involving various games and activities — mostly competitive ones, since they know their audience. There was an exhibition contest, where 3 teams of 3 members each competed while everyone else could spectate them or try to solve the problems on their own. The issue was that the constant commentary and loud electronic music made it difficult to concentrate on solving problems. They also wouldn't let us leave until 22:00, and the next day's program started at 09:00, so there wasn't much time to sleep.

The second day involved some more "non-serious" contests: an elimination tournament and a team relay. The additional activities and games were the same as on day one, so at some point it got a bit boring, and all that was left to do was play board games or browse the internet until the day was over. Some of the content was only in Japanese, but I suppose it's excusable since 91% of the participants were Japanese. Lots of staff members seemed unoccupied, so they were eager to socialize with the contestants.

The top 20 contestants were moved to an even more luxurious hotel and rewarded with some very gourmet-looking fish-based food. On the third day, we competed in the grand final. I already complimented the quality of the problems, but it seems they were saving the best for last — truly top shelf material, thanks to rng_58. I won, so that's nice too.

9 of us took an office tour with Indeed, the contest sponsor. We asked everything there is to ask about working at Indeed, and my overall impression is that it would be a great place to work if I knew Japanese.

After the Indeed visit, we finally had another free afternoon. Some of us explored Akihabara, a center for electronics and tentacles. Afterwards, we enjoyed some Monjayaki on the famous Monja street.

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8 years ago, # |
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https://atcoder.jp/

Whoa there're SEVEN (though 4 of them are short ones) contests being held in 3 days! Good luck to all the onsite finalists!

P.S. What is the difference between the finals and grand finals, and what are the elimination rounds for. It's a bit confusing :)

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    I have no idea either.

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    The weird thing is that the finals are rated while the grand finals aren't.

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      8 years ago, # ^ |
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      Exactly what I thought too.

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        8 years ago, # ^ |
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        Final -> both contests is rated (open and onsite) Grand Final -> only onsite contest is rated, but you can watch streaming

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8 years ago, # |
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8 years ago, # |
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The Grand Final was one of the best problemsets I ever solved. Thank you very much!

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