Sun, 29.05.2016
13 teams took part in HIIT Open 2016 programming contest on 28 May 2016 in Otaniemi. The contest was open to everyone interested in programming and algorithmic challenges — we had 34 participants in total, among them students or faculty from at least 6 different universities or universities of applied sciences and 3 different high schools, as well as some participants from the industry.
The winning team was "Game of Nolife", with Tuukka Korhonen, Otte Heinävaara, and Olli Hirviniemi, all of them students at the University of Helsinki. The 2nd place went to "Ace of Spades", with Janne Junnila (University of Helsinki), Tommi Pesu (Imperial College), and Kalle Luopajärvi (Seinäjoki upper secondary school), and the 3rd place went to "Noname 01", with Ilya Nikolaevskiy (Aalto University) and Khaled Gamal Abdelnaser (German University in Cairo).
The teams had 12 tasks to solve, and 5 hours of time. The winning team solved 9/12 tasks correctly, and the two runner-ups solved 8/12 tasks each, with “Ace of Spades” using less time in total than “Noname 01”.
An example of the tasks that the teams had to solve was “cent saving”: Whenever you pay something in cash, the total sum is rounded to the nearest 5 cents. Now given a list of items to buy, the task is to find out a way to save as much money as possible in the rounding. For example, if you are going to buy items with prices 41 and 42 cents, it would make sense to visit the shop twice (paying 40+40 cents, instead of 85 cents), while if you are going to buy items with prices 39 and 43 cents, it is better to buy them together (paying 80 cents in total, instead of 40+45 cents). For a small number of items, one can go through all possible ways of splitting the shopping list, but in the contest the teams had to come up with an algorithm that works efficiently even if there are tens of thousands of items.
If you missed the contest but would like to try to solve the problems, there is now a virtual online contest with the same problem set available at CSES.
Last updated on 29 May 2016 by Jukka Suomela - Page created on 29 May 2016 by Jukka Suomela