gigabuffoon's blog

By gigabuffoon, history, 4 years ago, In English

Recently I’ve heard that the North American ICPC regionals and divisionals are considering remote participation by all members of each 3-person ICPC team. This opens the possibility of simultaneous debugging, testing, test-case generation, and more. The differences that parallel terminal use can make in a team contest interest me very greatly, although I am not competing this year.

I’m curious, have any other regions announced such changes? What are contestants’ thoughts on how this change could impact their performance — or be taken advantage of? Might problem setters be considering altering the difficulty or quantity of problems in their problemsets? What will be the impact of being able to blast Twice all 5 hours? These are the questions we need to be asking.

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4 years ago, # |
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Same at ICPC NERC.

I'm a former participant only, but I believe it may significantly affect early-game/mid-game strategies for teams which have multiple strong coders. Say, you can solve/code/debug/submit easy problem in parallel. Mid-game you can also debug two hard problems in parallel, no more need to prioritize*.

On the other hand, collaboration is significantly impaired IMHO. Pair programming becomes harder.

  • — actually, you still have to prioritize and keep track of the contest to avoid common pitfall for individual contests: a participant getting stuck in a specific problem for a long time.