So I just finished Round 3 of the TCO.
After the Coding Phase, I was 11th in room, and 114 overall.
After the Challenge Phase, I was 4th in room, and 32 overall.
After the System Test Phase, I was 2nd in room, and dropped to 58 overall (250 failed- guess "brute force" wasn't so immune to timeout after all).
The upshot to this? Because 58 < 100, I'm in Round 4, and because I'm second in room- again!- I've netted myself another $100.00, bringing my TCO '05 winnings to $225.00.
If I can keep staying second in the room for the entire remainder of the competition, I'll be in very good shape, y'know? I somehow doubt that'll happen.
But onsite doesn't feel so far out of reach.
TCCC does allow grad students though. Ryan, John Deth, tomek and probably quite a few others are grad students..
It's something that I might look into at some point in the future, but I've got enough on my plate right now that I don't know that I need to be adding anything else that would cause more stress -- and with me as competitive and as much of a perfectionist as I am, it would definitely add stress -- at the moment.
Many congratulations, and good luck for the remainder.
Finals held at:
* Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, CA
The problem is the schedule. Every day of the contest has 13 hours of events scheudled, and I suspect that will pretty thoroughly take my time- and then that's assuming I'll even make it on site! The 100 coders left are nearly the 100 best on the site (which, all things considered, I really am not) and winding up in the top 48 of them will be a challenge.
I'll do my best!
The other problem is that even though they'd have to pay their own ways, my parents would almost certainly come. While the hotel room I'm given is, I believe, mandatory, there's that nice little aspect of my parents wanting to know what I'm doing at all times and probably supervising me for most or all of it.
And what my parents really won't like is that just making it to round 4 requires that I file a photo of myself with TopCoder- I've got to do that tomorrow so I can send it in by Friday. Whoops. I don't mind, but my parents will- as it's public on the site, and they wouldn't want my actual photo to ever be associated with my online presence, as they have made clear far too many times. Too bad for them; it's worth too much to me. They can't stop me now. (BWAHAHAHAHA!)
But... should be interesting!
I was really nervous after my 500 went down, and my 1000 was just barely too imprecise (I'm not kidding. One entry in the returned vector had a relative error of 1.1e-9, which is just outside the allowed error of 1e-9...). Luckily, I noted that after challenge phase, my 250 + 50 points for a challenge was good for exactly 100th.
So 73rd overall isn't exactly great, but I'll take it. The next one's the really important one anyhow.
...and I'm not sure if it's in a good way or not. :P
Many congratulations and best of luck in the rest!