So the ICPC regionals this year was November 16 instead of February like last year and it's cuz they are adjusting back to the schedule pre-covid. I knew it would come this early tho so I did spend some stretches in the summer while traveling grinding some segment tree problems but ultimately as the school year came I put all my free time towards recruiting and geoguessr lmao.
Before Contest
Either way, safe to say I wasn't proud of the amount of preparation I put in because I'm like the leader of the team now with the other 2 graduating from last year. We organized weekly practice sessions on Wednesday and sometimes on Saturday too, we would just virtual a contest as a team and get to feel out our team dynamics and splits. The week of the contest, I printed out the entire problem set on paper of the 2022 pacnw contest and we also simulated it more realistically with only one laptop and we put the livestrema on my laptop we could view a "live" scoreboard.
Anyway, going into the contest, we only have one goal and that is to advance to NAC, top 5 schools advance, and we know we're not beating Berkeley, Stanford, UBC, and U Wash. So it's UCSC vs. UC Davis for the 5th spot and you can throw in a wild card like SJSU or SFU or something too, so I honestly liked our chances, my two teammates this year were very strong it's a very strong class, let's talk about them really quick one of them is an upper CM and he actually just reached Master which is insane like he is the future of this club he is way stronger than me, then there is a freshmen that moved here from China when he was in 11th grade, I remember I spoke to him in chinese on discord when I first met him and he was really happy to be able to communicate with me. He's from SiChuan, he's also really strong, during our practice sessions he solved some really hard problems really fast, he's really good at some math-heavy observation-based problems and he was the only one our team who had knew how to implement string hashing. His template and code style is very hard to read tho, I will say generally like he uses some debugging file thing that I dont get but thats prob cuz I dont use cpp anyway. Anyway safe to say that I'm like the worst on the team which I'm really happy about because that really improves our chances.
I still remember we did virtuals with UC Davis's programming club and it was pretty even but overall I felt that we were a better team than Davis. So let's now fast forward to competition day. QDD who is a PhD student picked up my chinese teammate, me, this guy named ashwin, and one of the club leaders evan. Now this guy ashwin is literally a D1 yapper man holy cow this guy wouldn't stop talking and anytime I would have a conversation with qdd this guy would chime in and ask what we were talking about and make it about himself like hOLY COW. Bro I remember me, qdd, and joey started talking in Chinese about something because it was easier taht way and this guy like got worried and was like "hahaha, i dont understand anything" like bro this guy DOES NOT KNOW how to not talk LMAO it was funny tho like he was just a bit annoying like hes a good person he was so funny. Hes this like Indian international student studying his masters here and he just wants to talk to people lmao bro this guy legit wouldnt stop talking bro and then we were playing music and this guy chimed in and queued up like 3 of his bollywood songs when no one asked him to like im ngl at that time i didnt wanna listen to that no offense anyway
We met up with cole and everyone and when we got there I allen told me that timothy hasnt even left yet lmao. Oh yea also this contest is like 1-6pm instead of 10-3pm or something like last regionals, so we didnt have to wake up as early and everything. There was free breakfast during registration which was really good the cookies were so good and there was blueberry scone too and breakfast burritos. I also got a cup of vanilla latte coffee and that thing was kinda addicting i kinda get coffee drinkers now. However last year we got free subway mid-contest which was fire but because of the timing this year we just eat before.
Timothy showed up like really late like after the ceremony presentaiton thing and this guy pulled up with sweet greens it was so funny but he said his uber driver got pulled over LMAO idk why thats so funny but it was nice seeing mouse.
Contest
The contest for liek the first 3 hours overall went very well, our flow was super solid and we always had a problem on queue for us to do and we like had a gameplan. I think we were on pace to advance or something in the first 3 hours but I noticed how well Davis was doing they were like beating UBC and some teams. There was always something for us to do and at one point we had like the approaches for 3 problems down and we just needed to implement so that was good.
But then in the final 2 hours we just slowed down, I think it was problem J, so many teams solved problem J, but we couldn't. It was such a simple problem that we observed down to that the answer is always either 1 or 2,
This problem literally haunted our team, we spent the last 90 minutes pretty much all just absolutely perplexed on how our code gets WA. We modified to so many edge cases we thought of and nothing worked, we were literally just like "HOW IS THIS CODE NOT WORKING" and we would stare at the paper and just think and out of all 3 of us none of us considered the case where you can do multiple ranges wrapping aorund to get an answer >2
We ended with 9 problems solved, you needed 10 problems with good time penalty to advance, and if we solved that problem J fast enough we wouldve had a legit shot, but it woudlve been pretty close. I guess it would've been more heartbreaking if we missed it by time limit. I remember when the contest ended and we knew we wouldnt advance first thing I did was rush to find timothy to ask how to do J. And then when they drew out that example where the answer is 3 I just feel so dumb like how did all of us fixate on that so hard and not even question like the original proposition like its so hard to think about that case when u already wrongfully reduced the problem. Idk man yeah I knew i would feel this way we literally re-implemented in python cuz we were so desperate and i was just like "yeah, i guess the good thing is that we'll learn a lesson from this problem J"
And yeah during dinner which was papa john pizza I was just still staring at my diagrams hating myself for missing that case on J and the person behind me who was from Santa Clara was like "BRO WE THOUGHT THE ANSWER WAS EITHER 1 OR 2 TOO" and all the other UCSC teams made that same false reduction too. It's pretty easy to trace out why, i think xiaowuc1 knew what he was doing with that, its a good problem yeah just a skill issue.
SO yeah i mean the problem set was very easy normally you need like 7 problems to advance this year u need 10 like it was so random how easy the div1 problem set was. 10 problems is literally to the point where theres 3 problems left and one of them is this GCD inclusion-exclusion and one of the others is a triangle geometry problem. Like idk it was just so easy but like there werent any major flaws and theres nothing wrong with being too easy ig, it just doesnt add much variance for like opportunities for getting problems because literally like the only teams that solved those 2 hard questions already solved the 10 others so yeah like there weren't many pathways to take if u get what i mean. They could've legit just left out one of the easy problems that didnt offer much, i forgot which one but the number line one was so straightforward.
SO yeah it was really crushing, that night when we got back to santa cruz after that long drive I remember like feeling so down, i've never felt so down before, like the thoughts i was having was so crushing like i was just so down i was like so sad i was like literally just planning out how to bounce back and like just thinking about whats next for me and how i can motivate myself enough to start liking competitive programming again because i havent fully grind moded since like 2021 truthfully. I was just thinking about what it would look like for me to regain it, how to motivate myself.
I remember during the ceremony reveal thing afterwards I didnt pay attention to them revealing the scoreboard at all instead it was just me and mouse talking a lot about the problem set and our thoughts and stuff, then we called isaac cuz his southeast regional is the same day as ours and we talked for like a long time, he didnt advance either. Timothy was also super bummed out beacuse he wasn't the best Berkeley team so he doesnt advance, if ure in Timothy's position theres rly nothing u can do. They legit solved 11 problems they woudlve advanced if they were their own college thats super tough. So yeah it was just super nice and like just super relaxing to talk to timothy and isaac and just talking about everything and kinda grieving together and stuff. We literally were like, were gonna see each other next year in florida, lets all practice together and stuff we were rly going thru it.
So at the end the rankings goes UC Berkeley, UBC, Stanford, UC Davis, ... and OSU???? AND THEN U WASH, SFU, SJSU, THEN UC SANTA CRUZ. We got 9th best college which is really embarassing like yeah definitely not happy with how we performed but our team is literally young we will be back next year. Like that's just not ok that SJSU beat us man that shuoldnt be happening but yea im not gonna talk that much more about it except hOW DID OSU MAKE IT WHO DO THEY EVEN HAVE. LIKE THATS SO RANDOM THEY LITERALLY BEAT U WASH, during NAC last year they made the World FInals and we literally met the UWash team and played cards with them until 2 AM on the last day and they're so strong i thought they were a lock, how they get beat by OSU?? That's honestly crazy, i didnt have them on my radar at all its so random, ill definitely be looking forward to that cf blog post with teams advancing because wow thats so unexpected OSU making it over Uwash. Also worth mentioning is how strong UC Davis perfroamcen was, they were 4th pretty comfortably and u gotta give props to them. Also, I got one of my roommates evan into ICPC and he joined the club and he teamed with Liam notably who is a friend i made in classes, and they got 3rd in Div3 and first to solve problem G or something. I'm really proud of them, they represented our school the best honestly not even joking, like they should do Div1 next year if evan doesnt transfer schools. Really proud of them they practiced with us during Saturdays too and like its just really impressive like they are really great problem solvers.
So that's how ICPC went, I definitely should've wrote this earlier as like theres so much more to talk about but imma just leave it as this. Talking with timothy and isaac afterwards was honestly like kinda the highlight for me, along with just being with my teammates and kinda our experience, like we didnt do horrible, theres a lot to learn from, and im really liking our chances next year. I'm really grateful for my teammates really, they're honestly so strong at programming and very experienced. I just definitely have to do my work, I definitely need to switch to cpp and yea ive thought it about it a lot, i know what my thoughts are and yeah maybe theres just nothing else to it then that i have to put in the work necessary. I saw this quote the other day and its like very simple: "1. set a goal, 2. do the work necessary to achieve", i've been thinking so much about this 1.5th step about how to motivate myself and everything, but maybe there isn't a 1.5th step, maybe i just straightup do the work necessary. Maybe its just that simple, maybe it isnt. Ig well see, it will be a long year until next November.
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