Hello everyone!
As many of you might notice, there is a new event in an ICPC WF schedule this year.
It's cool that ICPC found new sponsor for WF. And new activities may give a lot of fun for WF participants.
But what the reason to make this event mandatory? (There are already JetBrains TechTrack (45 mins) and TechShowcase (2 hours).)
On my mind, some teams are going to ICPC WF to participate in the WF itself. They work hard to show the best of they skills during WF. And 7 hours of mandatory events on the day before Dress Rehearsal, and about 5 hours on the Dress Rehearsal Day (I understand this part, except "Coaches Award Ceremony") would not help teams to relax and prepare to contest itself.
How do you think about this issue? I want to hear the community members' opinions. Yeah, I copied parts of the text from ICPC WF 2019 Keyboard Issue blog :)
In fact, if there are enough of community members who share my opinion, let's talk to Bill during WF about it?
Pure trash. Also it looks like this is an official competition so you (probably) can't use mobile phone, have only one laptop per team, etc. I wonder if one could take a book. So it is 3 hours of doing absolutely nothing (for people who don't do machine learning at all, at least). This is an insane decision by WF organizers. I hope the rules will be softer next year
please allow me to bring my Nintendo Switch and headphones, and you can do fucking 10h marathons, I don't care.I think it's a lot to ask every team to bring a personal laptop. Not everyone owns a laptop, it's a significant risk to travel with one, and needing to carry it all through the Excursion will be a pain. Also, for those who for whatever reason cannot bring a laptop: will one be provided? if not, what happens for the 3 hours? if so, why not just provide one for everyone and level the field?
Secondly, why announce this now? They've had a schedule up for some time and this is coming out barely a week before the competition. If this is supposed to be a part of the competition we should have been given time to prepare. I doubt many teams will take it seriously.
Can Codeforces schedule a 3h round in that timeslot, so that teams who want it can use that time to prepare for the actual competition? They seem to promise an Internet connection...
In an ideal world, you need to only appear for the actual competition and can do anything else you feel is helping you to prepare for the actual competition. Socializing is highly advisable, but if all you ever want to do is sleep and eat, it should be acceptable. Highly discouraged, yes, but should not lead to disqualifications. I seem to recall contestants in Olympic Games skipping Opening Ceremony if they compete the next day. So I never personally agreed with certain events being mandatory in ICPC WF, but this seems to be getting beyond ridiculous now...
I'm not completely sure it's actually mandatory for all ICPC contestants. The part with required might be just for what they are about to say: something like for all participants of this challenge, it's required that they have a laptop etc. At least that's what I understood and what I hoped for. It'd be absolutely insane for them to expect people to actually know stuff related to machine learning. My team is made up only of 1st years, I don't see how it's justifiable to expect any of us to know anything about ML.
It is marked with a red star in schedule. Which means "Required attendance for teams with on-site coach accessible". From World Finals rules: "Finalists must attend all required events from On-Site Registration to Celebration as indicated in the Schedule of Events. Failure to attend any required event will result in disqualification and forfeiture of scholarships and prizes".
I remember a lot of people not attending Red Stared events, as I don't think anyone will check the attendance, I mean come on it's not a lecture :V.
Wait, What? is attending lectures mandatory?
I think it's another issue of the ICPC WF. They declare a strict rules and significant punishment for violating it. But they don't really check if participants follow the rules.
So you have to play a game: follow rules and get disadvantage of being exhausted during WF. Or not follow them, and... who knows, what would happen?
You're required to participate, you're not required to know anything about ML ;)
Anyway, it's marked with a red star in the World Finals schedule so it looks like really is compulsory.
I don't think they realized that half of teams will be sitting there without taking it seriously (or completely doing nothing) yet. So wait until 2020 when they make it so they would disqualify you if you don't reach a certain score in this and will try to justify that anyone qualified to World Finals should be able to get that score easily.