As my first invitational contest, and probably my first ICPC-level contest as well if the provincial contest does not count, the result was not bad in the end. We got a silver medal. Still, to be honest, I feel like we could have done a little better, and that I did not help the team as much as I had imagined.
We landed in Shenyang at around midnight on July 27. After that, we went out together for some Shenyang barbecue. It was actually pretty good, just different from what I am used to in Zhejiang. It feels like people in the northeast prefer flavors that are a bit sweeter.
After dinner, we went back to the hotel. Only after arriving did I realize that the hotel I stayed in seemed to have been converted from an old residential building. There were no lights when I went in, so I had to find my way in the dark. Fortunately, the room itself was quite nice. Even if it had not been that good, I probably could have accepted it anyway, since it really was cheap for one night.
On the 28th, I met up with the teammates who arrived later. At noon, we ate KFC downstairs from the hotel. Yes, after traveling all the way there, we ended up eating KFC. The main reason was simply that we really did not know what else to eat.
After lunch, we walked to the university to pick up our materials and get ready for the practice contest. The practice contest had 3 problems. I started by reading C, while one teammate solved A directly, and another teammate opened C as well. The remaining problem B did not give us much of an idea. Later we found out that it was probably an original problem from the 2024 Northeast Regional Contest. I still have not upsolved it. Guilty as charged.
Near the end of the practice contest, we went to eat at Northeastern University’s cafeteria. The organizers gave each person a 15 yuan meal voucher, which felt slightly stingy. We went to the self-service dish counter and picked a few things at random. Aside from the chicken breast pretending to be an Orleans chicken leg, everything else was actually pretty decent. After eating, we went back to the hotel to rest. I do not even know what I did that night, but in the end I played on my phone until midnight before going to sleep.
On the morning of the 29th, we had breakfast at the hotel. But because we were staying at a partner hotel for the contest, breakfast was a bit overwhelmed by demand. In the end, we just ate something quickly and headed out for the contest.
The contest officially started at 10<00>. To be honest, I was still way too nervous before it began. At the start, I was responsible for entering the contest URL, account, and password, and I even typed something wrong, which scared me quite a bit.
My teammates probably looked at K first, while I opened problems from the back and looked at M. At first glance, I thought M would be an easy problem. After reading it more carefully, I realized it was a bit complicated and felt it was probably a data structure problem, so I skipped it for the moment.
The first accepted problem we saw on the scoreboard was L from Dalian University of Technology, so we also moved to L. One teammate worked on L, but got one WA first. I looked at the code and pointed out a small issue, and after that it passed smoothly. Another teammate was working on K, and after one WA, that also passed.
After that, we opened E and F. F passed on the first try based on a teammate’s idea. E, on the other hand, made us trip over ourselves again and again. At first, we sorted directly, but no matter what we did, it was wrong. Eventually, a teammate stress-tested it and found that we should sort by weight instead. After that, E finally passed.
At that point, we should still have been somewhere in the middle of the silver medal range. Later, we went to I and J. I looked at I first, but did not have much of an idea. The other two teammates were writing J, but the first version was wrong, which made the situation pretty uncomfortable for a long while.
At some point, I glanced at A and felt that it looked like a DP problem that could be written. But when I saw that only one team had passed it on the scoreboard, we eventually decided not to open it. After the contest, when I upsolved it, I found that A was actually writable, at least much more writable than M.
With about 20 minutes left, our senior figured out the correct idea for J. I also felt that it was right, but the implementation was really hard to write. I and J ended up competing for machine time in the final stretch. In the end, although we finished writing the code for J, there was probably still a small flaw in it, and it did not pass.
We ended with 4 solved problems. Before the scoreboard was frozen, we were ranked 72nd, while the silver cutoff was 84th. At that time, I felt that the chance of getting silver had already become quite small, and it was honestly pretty painful.
When we went to the library for the closing ceremony, I kept thinking about whether we could still get that silver medal. I did not really listen carefully to the solution explanations. Later, when the rolling scoreboard began and reached the 4-problem area, I kept checking other teams’ submissions and silently hoping they would not pass. That was terribly guilty of me, so I apologize here to all teams in the 4-problem area who submitted after the freeze.
Fortunately, everyone in the 4-problem area also had a hard time. In the end, only seven or eight teams moved up, and we managed to keep the silver medal.
For dinner, we found a northeastern iron-pot stew restaurant. It turns out that iron-pot stew takes about an hour before you can actually eat it. It was really slow. Also, eating iron-pot stew in northeastern weather above 30 degrees Celsius was painfully hot. But the taste was indeed quite good.
In the end, only my senior and I took the flight back together.
Both teams from our university got silver medals in the end, so that was a happy result for everyone. However, our team actually did not perform as well as the other team. They solved one more problem, I, and even transformed it into a graph problem and solved it with Dijkstra. I completely failed to think of that during the contest. One teammate did think of it, but did not tell the rest of us, which was a bit unfortunate.
If we had passed I and J, I feel like we might still have had a shot at gold. The main issue was probably that I held the team back a little. A problem like J should have been something I could handle.
For me personally, I still need to strengthen my thinking ability. A lot of the time, I practice problems that feel very “algorithmic”, but in an ICPC contest, problems do not always appear in the way I expect. I still need to train more.
For the upcoming online contests, let us keep going.