Topcoder: SRM 447 Recap

I’ve decided to start doing recaps on every TopCoder Algorithm SRM I do. As I very slowly move my way up, I’m excited to explore what I’m doing wrong and right in TC to be a better algorithm junkie

The Lead-In

Like a lot of other TopCoder matches, I did this one in the CS Club. CS Club students don’t work together on the SRM of course, but even being in the same room is kind of cool to build a sort of nerd camaraderie.

SRM 447 was special in that Facebook was sponsoring it. My friends Tim and Dave, being avid TopCoders and engineers there, joined some HR folks from Facebook and sat in the lobby answering questions about what it was like to do engineering at Facebook. Of course, a bunch of us had to flame them. My friend Parris snuck in a comment asking “how much wood could a wood chuck chuck,” and I asked if “[Facebook] had like a website or something that detailed what they did.” I was pretty surprised at my joke question’s response. Several other TC programmers IM’d me with very serious and vehement responses to that question. I thought it was sarcastic enough to be obvious that I was joking, but I think there was a language barrier in play.

I put on the Massive Attack (Inertia Creeps) and jumped into the 250 once the clock hit 0.

Using the Tools of the Enemy

For the last year I’ve been working on a CS research paper on how certain types of algorithms can be applied to solve pertinent problems (Ha! Alliteration!) in business and economics. Finding ways of hacking Bellman-Ford, Min-Cost Max Flow, and Dijkstra to address critical business intelligence issues is a lot of extremely nerdy fun for me. It’s also been getting me thinking about examining the issue from the other side of things:

How can we use the math from economics to solve problems in technology and software engineering?

MIX[1]: Silverlight Burns It Up

There’s a lot to talk about for the first day of MIX09. Let’s get to it.