˙◠˙
Update
I bombed the second tryout too. Such a clown :(
Original Post
The first ICPC tryout took place yesterday, which would decide who would represent UCLA in the top 3 teams of the regional. Coming into the tryout, I was feeling reasonably confident that I’d be able to make the top 9, given that I’d been working hard, and my team just got 3rd place in the recent NAQ.
However, things didn’t go the way I hoped for. I got quite nervous even before the contest started, and I could feel my adrenaline pumping, which in hindsight, was the reason for my terrible performance.
The first stage of the contest went smoothly. The first 2 problems were easy as expected. Even though I got stuck on problem C at first, where I came up with an optimization that I couldn’t determine the exact complexity, I quickly solved problem D-F and came back to problem C. At this point, I was definitely in the top 9 (top 5-7ish).
Problem G was also fairly straightforward. However, it took me 4 submissions to AC due to integer overflow issue - the most basic bug that would’ve taken me 1 minute to solve. Due to the 60 extra time penalty I received, I actually fell to the 10th place after solving the problem. There was still almost 2 hours left in the contest, so I took a bathroom break. At the time, I was still confident and thought to myself: I just need to solve one of problem H or I…
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to solve any more problems in the remaining time. Problem H requires matrix exponential, which I’m not familiar with, so I decided to focus on problem I. Looking back, problem I is just an implementation problem that, given at any other time, I’m confident that I can solve within an hour. But my brain froze, and I panicked. I started implementing a weird solution, without given it much thought to make sure it works. The remaining time was just painful debugging that turned out to be fruitless.
What have I learned from this? To always keep calm and don’t rush to implement. During a contest, don’t pay too much attention to other people’s performance, and especially don’t panic; focus on the problems that you can solve.