Converita !! (continued…)

We went to attend the prelims contest… It was choose the answer type…

I and Sidd were team mates yet again… Sidd dint allow me to even thk the answers for prelims.. he was bombarding continuously the answers for each question …. hmm … thats cool right… hmm may be!! but the real thing is that… the ppl from SSN had just copied questions from a site.. which Sidd had seen just the day b4 !! And not even a single question was not from that site…!! -> (This is not double exclamation … dis is double ‘NOT’) -> (and dis is not forest!!)
So we were selected for the finals… The only team from MIT..!!!

A seniors team which came was not too appreciative about that… One of them asked us… how much did u attend?? wid a rather not so nice way…. They even fought wid some poor gal who was one of the incharge for the contest… We didnt know wot happened but even their team came to the finals..!! We just went there and gave our best…

To comment on the questions…
There were 3 questions..
1) It was just some simple ad-hoc kinda thing wid processing on strings….
We did that problem… together at first and we did it very carefully and artfully!! considering even some weird type of test cases… we did it as if we are coding for some hi-fi OPC… It was a BULB for us when the evaluators came and tested that prog. of ours wid a only one trivial test case..!!
2) The second one was a code which has to be debugged!!….
The code was given to us in paper… To our surprise… it was ANSI Standard C code…capable of executing in Linux… But … we were asked to work on TC @ Windows !!! We have to debug and show them the executable…. We just told them that its not possible…. but a gal there said confidently that.. “That is the error in the program and U have to correct it!” Later they said we can write the errors in the paper itself….
3) Implementing the Traveling Salesman Problem…!!
We just didnt know how to do it… we were about to leave without trying that….but wen the gal there said just write something and we may consider giving some marks for it…. it is enof if u write wot u will do as a algo… !! hmmm…. well we just kinda twisted the dijikstra’s algo…(since both of them are concerned wid shortest paths!!) and came outta the lab…

The Sens told us that u have to use Floyd Warshall for that… they told that it took time for them to implement it… hmm.. One of them even commented that its Tough to code standard algos… and that adhoc things can be done by anyone…!!! Later We found that the Floyd-Warshall has nothing to do wid TSP…. and implementation of Floyd Warshall Algo…(All Source Shortest Path) is as easy as taking a candy from a baby…!!
OK… The results were about to be declared… Some team got the first prize… And WE WERE SECOND !!! [:D] … The Sens team came Third… Do u expect they were happy!!?? …
Rs.2000 was the prize money!!! I and Sidd Shared it… Felt that attending contests is a nice freelance way of earning money!!! [:p]….