Prag, 29.03.04-04.04.04

I thought it might be a good idea to switch to english, as I may have some readers from Canada as well and I do not want to force them into using Babelfish again.

IBM has taken a lot of nice pictures that are even index by name and event. Especially their pictures inside buildings are better than was possible with my camera.

On Monday morning we had an IBM recruiting event where some people working for IBM in leading positions told us, how great it is and so on. The event was started by a children chorus. The rest was rather boring, the only highlight was a talk by Erich Gamma (who is one of the authors of the original Design Patterns book).

We spent the rest of the day with a touristic excursion to Prague castle. It is located on a big area on a hill above the old city of Prague and has a lot of really beautiful old buildings as well as a nice view on Prague.

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Tuesday started with the Opening Ceremony where we entered the great hall of the Obecni Dum, the place were the contest would take place, for the first time. While we marched in, the Prague Symphony Orchestra played and we all felt really important. After some speeches given by various representatives of the the Czech Republic, Prague, IBM and the ACM, we headed for lunch.

There we got the problem description for the Java Challenge, a fun contest that would take place in the afternoon. Every team had to write a program that plays a medieval ruler. You could command your knights and peasants, take land, attack other knights and capture castles.

We formed an alliance with the 3 other Candian teams (Calgary, Queens and Waterloo) that helped us to finish 4th, with Calgary winning the whole contest. Sadly, only the first 3 places got prices and are mentioned on the web-site.

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Today were the actual World Finals we all waited for. As some of you may have seen over the internet we had a very bad start, not solving any problem in the first hour. We gradually improved and finally solved 4 problems, finishing 15th together with 11 other teams. Here are the official results.I think this is a great result, as we competed against 73 teams from all over the world (which were selected from over 3,100 teams in regional contest which in turn have been selected from their universities). I have to admit, though, that the contest did not go very well for us and that I think we could have done a little bit better. However, it is over now, and I'm really happy that I could participate in this great event. We all had a great time.

During the contest Moni took a few nice pictures of the event. We are wearing black t-shirts and are sitting on the table with the "University of British Columbia" sign on it. You get a ballon for every porblem you solve, were the colors correspond to the problem so that you can easily see, which problems are solved most. Of course we got a lot of fancy equipment from IBM, some of which can be seen on the picture.

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