HS Computing Club

We meet on Saturdays, at 11:00 am in Computing Science Center (CSC) 2-49, UofA Campus . (Please note different time and room than last year, the building is the same.) If you come by car then the most convenient parking is either Stadium or Windsor car parkade.

The goal of our meetings is to prepare high-school (and, if we find any, junior high-school) students for problem solving competitions like Canadian Computing Competition. The 2012 Stage 1 of CCC is on February 28.

Be prepared to discuss problems from Stage 1 of past CCC. Please bring a problem to share. Have a look at some easier problems from past Iverson exams at UofA.

At each meeting we will look at a set of problems and discuss their solutions. We are not planning to use computers during these meetings. The participants are encouraged to bring problems which they tried to solve and either want to share or need help with.

Next meeting

The last meeting of the season. See you in September.

March 31 - Senior problems from recently examined CCC Stage 1.

Past meetings

• March 24 - Senior problems from recently examined CCC Stage 1.
• March 17 - Senior problems from recently examined CCC Stage 1.
• March 3 - discussed problems from CCC 2012 that was run last Tuesday.
• February 25 - Stage 1 problems of 2008 CCC.
• February 18 - Stage 1 problems of 2007 CCC.
• February 11 - Junior and some senior problems of Stage 1 problems of 2006 CCC.
• February 4 - Junior problems of Stage 1 problems of 2005 CCC.
• January 28 - Junior problems of 2004 CCC.
• January 21 - Stage 1 problems of 2003 CCC.
• January 14 - Stage 1 problems of 2002 CCC
• December 17 - Multiplication game. Euclid's game.
• December 10 - Candy game again. Simple cobminatorial games. Multiplication game.
• December 3 - Making triangle with the largest area out of a set of sticks. Dividing a pile of coins into two piles to minimize the difference. The game of picking numbers from a doubly ended queue.
• November 26 - Discussed code for representing a number as a sum of four primes (still to be sped up).
• November 19 - Discussed code for the maximum sum subarray.
• November 12 - Discussed Python code for maximum sum subarray (HA students). Two person number games (from Dawon).
• November 5 - Lights & switches in a row. Maximum sum subarray and given sum subset.
• October 29 - Solving Towers of Hanoi recursively and iteratively.
• October 22 - We finished the Alice crystal problem started on Oct 15. Dawon put forward the problem of finding longest increasing subsequence in a sequence of 1000000. We discussed only the slow solution and the faster solution would be too much for now.
• October 15 - We finished discussing Dawon's problem of grouping numbers and studied Problem S3: Alice Through the Looking Glass from Stage 1 of CCC 2011 Stage 1 of CCC 2011.
• October 8 - the first meeting of the season. I am aware that this is a long weekend but let us give it a try. We will start with discussing details of the 2011 Iverson exam and later have a peek at the problems from this year International Olympiad in Informatics.
• The 2010-11 season.

Email piotr@cs.ualberta.ca if you have questions.

Contests and Olympiads

• Canadian Computing Competition
• USACO programming competition
• IOI - International Olympiad in Informatics
• Central European Olympiad in Informatics

• TopCoder material analysing problems and algorithms. An excellent tutorial stuff, however, you need to register before you can see all the interesting stuff. Note that participation in the TopCoder contests may be very frustrating for beginners but it is a great practice for the ones in the know.

Problem Sets with on-line judging

• USACO Contest Gateway

• University of Valladolid, Spain
• Ural State University, Russia
• Gdansk University of Technology, Poland
• Zhejiang University, China

Material

Questions? email: piotr@cs.ualberta.ca