Of Some Goods and Some Bads…
The last week has been a real exhausting one for me. There was this competition Vision (Yeah.. the same one I had a go at last year. Unfortunately, that post is not available on this server, and my old blog is no more. So I will have to dig into my stack and get that post… In short, I am not giving any link here.) and I had participated in two of it’s events.
The first event was a C/C++ coding competition. First we had to give a screening test and 25 teams out of some 100 were selected from that. We, me and my partner, Aniket, passed that test in 18th place. I was a little off then to tell the truth. I was certainly not expecting such a low ranking.
Then we had to write a program in C or C++ in 2 hours. The program statement was that, if there is an input stream with any number of characters, strings, integers and floating point values. We had to sort each one group in a separate variable. Then sum the integers and the floating point numbers. And display the result of the variables and the sum. In the end, we had to connect all those variables and create the output stream.
When I saw it, I exclaimed, WTF? I mean, it was bad as it is and neither me nor my partner remembered the syntax to write a file and read form it. To to it all up, we had to use that useless Borland compiler and TurboC from 1992. It did not have the string datatype. It did not have the cin.getline function. It did not have namespaces. It did not have many such new function, now a standard part of C++. And that editor TurboC was a mess.
But the real reason was still that we did not remember the syntax. We knew what to do. (There were alternatives, but none of them were as easy as this one. Or if there were any easy ones out there, then we did not know of them and still do not know). But we did not remember the syntax.
We ended up separating the characters and the strings. We also separated the integers. BUT we could no make the sum. It turned out that we had to use something other than that file. We used ASCII values (I know.. very bad way of doing a program.) and screwed it all up.
Soon we learned that the top 3 people had only managed to make the sum of integers. Meaning that there were 2 teams who had completed 3 steps and we were the ones who had completed 2.5. Finally, we came to know that we were placed 5th. Sadly though, only 3 prizes were given.
This was bad. And good too. I realized that going back to basics was the only thing. And I have already started that. Digging the books and sites to know these quirks and oddities of C/C++. I want that prize, and all the ones I participate in to from the next time… I am just making sure that I prepare myself for the war.
The Second Event
The second event was an on the spot Paper Presentation competition. My partner for this event was Bhaskar. Again, we had to pass a screening test. It was an aptitude test with 50 questions to be solved in 30 minutes. We did very bad. I was expecting a lot more but got only 34 outta 50. Again, to my disbelief, we were ranked 35 with my friend ranked first with 35 points.
Anyways, as long as we were selected for the next round, the scores did not matter at all. But I wanted more. Then we were given 1.5 hours to browse the net and create a power point presentation of it. There were 2 subjects on the list and we had to select one of them. They were ‘The impact of IPL on world economy and cricket’ and ‘The usage of Mobiles after 5 years’. We selected the later one.
We did our best to create the presentation without any technical information at all. For one thing, we cannot predict the future of technology. Especially when the time is 5 years from now. The second reason was that the topic name was Future Usage and not The Future of Mobiles.
We did well in our presentation. I thought (again) that we were not upto the mark. I did not even think that we would win, but we did. We came second. It was a shock. I was confident that we could not win with that performance; but we did.
The presentation was to be given in 6 minutes. We finished it just on the bell. Bhaskar talked well. Our job was to get through the Aptitude and Created the PP. And his was to make sure that we did not cross the 6 minutes line.
Anyways, we won. And that is a good thing. Not much left to say now… Just thought that my loyal readers ought to know about this…
This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 10:52 pm and is filed under Article, My Life, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Aditya March 8th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Thank you very much…