Brazilian ICPC Summer School 2018

This is a two weeks long event, with theoretic lectures from outstanding instructors in the mornings, and competitive programming contests in the afternoons. It was held from January 22nd to February 3rd in the city of Campinas, São Paulo.

I have participated in this summer school last year, and I can say that it is really challenging. Instructors are usually top ranked ex-competitors, the contests they propose are hard, and to add another difficulty, this year one of my teammates, Ivan, couldn’t come.

We decided take part anyway, in a 2-people team with Brian, my other teammate. We know that the contests are challenging, but we also know that they are really beneficial for us, and that we are a little bit better than last year.

First Week

During the first week, our instructor was Mikhail Tikhomirov, also known as Endagorion. At the time of this writing, he is ranked 19th on Codeforces, one of the most prominent competitive programming platforms.

He gave us a welcoming warm up contest, with 26 problems to solve in 5 hours. Anyone who has participated in competitive programming competitions before knows that this is an insane number of problems, since usual contests don’t exceed 14. However, the tasks were not so hard, and at this time, my team have solved almost all of them.

To continue with non-standard contests, he also proposed two “thematic” ones. One of them was about geometry, and the other one was about strings. These two topics are some of the most avoided ones, so I can see why would he want to make single contests dedicated to each of them.

At first I didn’t like the idea, since in my team, each member covers some topics, and therefore, a thematic contest could potentially be great for one of the members, but useless to the others. However, these two contests were the ones in which I learned the most, because of exactly this, having to solve problems which are usually not my business.

Second Week

The second week was given by Tomasz Idziaszek, he is one of the co-authors of “Looking for a Challenge”, a book explaining in deep difficult problems extracted from famous international programming competitions. He is also in Codeforces as monsoon, however, he doesn’t participate regularly.

He started the week by talking about the ‘knapsack problem’. While this topic is rather standard, he explained some other variations that are not so widely known. He also explained the ‘min-queue’ data structure, which proved to be really useful later on during his contests.

I really liked the problems he proposed, since they were hard, but not impossible, and even if we couldn’t get right some of them during the contests, they are on our list of next problems to solve. He used his lecture time to explain problems from competitions of previous days, and that was great to discover some tricks and clever ideas.

Overall

Apart from the academic point of view, this summer school was also great in a more personal way. I got to know a lot of people there, which I hope to see in future competitions, and I had a wonderful time learning about their culture.