SRM 219 writeup

Easy problem involved finding the maximum number that corresponds to a certain formula. The tricky portion was making sure the floating point operations did not screw up your solution. My thought here was to brute-force the solution (you could easily compute all feasible numbers in the 8-second time limit) instead of being fancy and try to solve the formula - the idea would have worked, but I got careless with the computations and failed system tests to an easily-avoided overflow. Need to be less hasty and more careful.

Medium problem was relatively straight-forward, asking for the "best" candidate, based on multiple criteria (of variable and ordinal importance - less important criterion are only used to resolve ties). The most elegant solution that I saw used a custom Comparator.

Hard problem was a classic example of the Subset sum problem. The two attempts that were submitted within the 75-minute time limit unfortunately had no optimization and died to timeout cases. I was unable to implement a solution with the time remaining to me. My TODO list should include coding a solution to this problem before the next SRM.

One remarkable thing about this SRM is that my room contained three Filipinos. (yay!) It was nice meeting hotblue and mhykol. Congratulations to hotblue for winning the room! :)

They are also both attempting Component Competitions, so the best of luck to them.

Now's as good a time as any to sign up!