"Accepted", this was the most sought after word for the 24 hours ended at 5:30AM today (24th October 2010). I'm pretty sure that people in the computer laboratories of Department of Electrical Engineering, Department of Computer Science and Faculty of Information Technology of University of Moratuwa and thousands around the globe eagerly looked for this word, "Accepted".
IEEEXtreme 4.0 which is a global programming competition organized by IEEE was held for 24 hours starting from 00:00:00 UTC, 23rd October 2010, it's 5:30AM on 23rd on local time. People can compete in groups not exceeding 3 members a group. They post some questions, real world ones and we have to code to get the answer and submit online.So if the answer is correct, the web interface of the competition software displays the magic word "Accepted", else it display a general error message like "runtime error" upon which yeah with some effort we have to modify the code and resubmit until "Accepted". Then based on some criteria like time took to submit the answer from the time the question released (not quite sure though), they rank us. This is basically the procedure of the competition.
This was my first experience at IEEEXtreme and it was yeah simply magnificent. The group consisted of Pulasthi Mahavithana, Andun Sameera and myself. I'm from the Department of Electrical Engineering and the other two from the Department of Computer Science. Apart from our team there were 36 teams from University of Moratuwa competing for Xtreme 4.0 which is about 3 times greater than the number for Xtreme 3.0 in which one of the teams from the University of Moratuwa became the first in the globe. And at the end of the 24 hours we were ranked 162 among the 970 teams participated from all over the world. yep HAPPY :-)
There were 16 questions which they released with a 6 hours interval, 4 questions each time. Out of the 16 our team managed to submit 9 with that magic word "Accepted". Why I named it the magic word was that as soon as the team members saw it, next was a burst of happiness, +1 status of confidence, a relaxed mentality although limited until we read the next question. There were two questions that we almost finished but not "Accepted" and we couldn't figure out where or what the error was. That's the nature. The submission has to be a complete, partials are not "Accepted". After all it is a COMPETITION. We successfully submitted answers for 7 questions in the first 12 hours and in the final 12 hours we could only submit 2 with "Accepted".
It was a great experience and we hope to do better next time.Special thanks should go to the IEEE Student Branch of University of Moratuwa for organizing such an event, conducting practice sessions in prior, supplying us with food and all that and being with us and encouraging us.
I hope that I'll be able to add more "Accepted" to the next year's blog post :-)
NOTE : While writing the last line I though to count the number of "Accepted"s (not including this one) in the post. Surprise, it summed to 9, exactly the number we submitted successfully. Random, nothing serious. Just thought to state it.
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Yes, definitely more "Accepted" @ Xtreme 5.0
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