November 05, 2005
Knox does it again
Just got back from Urbana (again), where this week it was the Knox computer programming team competing against teams from a lot of colleges bigger than us. It went a lot better than last year (not hard), and Knox acquitted itself well: our two teams were 5th and 7th at the site (of 17, including three UIUC teams that beat us), and 23rd and 54th in the region (of 121).
So our teams did about as well as last year, but the competition was much smoother. Learning from our mistakes, the site coordinator set up the lab in advance and gave the entire group fifteen minutes in the morning to try out the judging system, submitting known-bad and known-good submissions and so on. Good for the teams, and great for the judges; as a result, we were much more confident that everything worked. And it did; not a glitch in sight. The judges got to have their usual frustrating and fun time seeing what errors people were making (and making, and making) in the course of writing their programs.
And now I'm sitting in the middle of a raging thunderstorm, marvelling that a thin sheet of tar paper (or its modern equivalent) is successfully keeping my attic dry. On the drive home, I was starting to get a bit worried...
"That's why it's called pseudocode, jackass." --overheard
Posted by blahedo at 10:42pm on 5 Nov 2005