123rum123 at the IrlCPC 2017

The Irish Collegiate Programming Contest (IrlCPC) 2017 was held on Saturday, 25th of March, in sunny University College Cork.

I was competing with two of my housemates, Cian Ruane, and Ross O'Sullivan. Myself, Cian Ruane, and Stefan Kennedy came 2nd place at the IrlCPC last year, so I fancied our chances this year.

Our team, 123rum123 (named for the password of our other housemate's boyfriend), flew to the top of the board from the beginning, finishing first in the practice round.

We were hyped for the real competition, and quick off the block, we solved 5 of the 6 problems with less stress than we expected. We worked very well as a team, and had a lot of fun!

However, that last, forsaken problem... It was a topological sort, and my only previous problem I could compare to it was a Project Euler problem I solved. However, I couldn't find a way to apply any solutions I knew for that problem to this, and any graph-based or set-based solution was too slow.

Alas, we only got 4 points for problem 5. It was the only we didn't get full marks in, leaving us 6 points from a perfect score.

While we had solved the other problems faster (we think), 2 teams from Trinity College passed us out (fair deuce to them) and solved the final problem, leaving us in 3rd place at the end of the competition.

We were (of course) delighted - third isn't bad at all :) We are somewhat familiar with the team that came 1st, and we beat them in the recent Hashcode, so it wasn't all bad!

Thanks to Google, Newsweaver, and UCC for the good day that was in it. We'll win in future xo