Skip to main content

Challenge24 EC

Challenge24 had been started as an internal competition at the local techincal university of Budapest. For now it became an international programming contest which is being organized 8th time this year. The contest itself usually happens in May when teams must be present personally but it's preceeded by a qualifying session (a.k.a Electronic Contest) which has been arranged on the last weekend of February and teams didn't have to be present personally, just to be online.

At Electronic Contest there are up to 8 combinatorical, geometrical, game theorical problems which have to be solved by sending the result files to the central server. Teams are free to choose platform and programming language.

More information including rules, list of teams and their scores, assignment of the Electronic Contest can be found on the homepage. The name is Challenge24, because the main contest in May lasts for 24 hours.

I didn't take part nor this year nor earlier but I usually download and solve some tasks from the Electronic Contest's problem set, just to keep my mind rolling. I need these screwed examples because at work I'm developing administration and web-based software components for business sector where capability of whoomping buzzwords and using the four elementary math operations is rather enough than real thinking and planning.

Sometimes I envy guys who are working on games, 3D engines, embedded devices where the iron is highly finite or anything else than administrative software.

And I'm curious how leader teams are preparing for the competition. I guess they need a very rich algorythm collection, they have to know perfectly the language and the IDE they are using, strong self-confidence is also a must in algorythms but I don't know how deep mathematical knowledge is required. How much counts the targeted knowledge, how much are exercies finger-practices for those who have targeted knowledge, let's say geometrical examples. It would be interesting to know what language and IDE do they use. Do they use mainstream production languages (Java, C#, C++) or use some functional or logic programming languages like Prolog? Do they use artificial intelligence modules?

Who are the leader teams at all? University students? Colleagues in a company? Talent freelancers? It's a pity that challenge24.org doesn't serve a short introduction of the teams. Hey! Write a comment if you know anything abut them. So I don't know anything but it seems something goes very well in Sweeden and Poland.

Congratulations!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Client's transaction aborted

I've met the above error message using a Wicket 1.2 / EJB3 intranet application under Glassfish v2 . Here is the more particular head of the stack trace: javax.ejb.TransactionRolledbackLocalException: Client's transaction aborted at com.sun.ejb.containers.BaseContainer.useClientTx(BaseContainer.java:3394) at com.sun.ejb.containers.BaseContainer.preInvokeTx(BaseContainer.java:3274) at com.sun.ejb.containers.BaseContainer.preInvoke(BaseContainer.java:1244) at com.sun.ejb.containers.EJBLocalObjectInvocationHandler.invoke(EJBLocalObjectInvocationHandler.java:195) at com.sun.ejb.containers.EJBLocalObjectInvocationHandlerDelegate.invoke(EJBLocalObjectInvocationHandlerDelegate.java:127) This exception raised on the integration server sometimes, randomly, for simple page fetch operations. After pressing reload on the browser, the operation was usually successful. I couldn't reproduce the failure on the local machine where I regularly restart the app server and

jxl.log

In an intranet production environment we have running a Glassfish v2 appserver with several J2EE applications which all use JexcelApi , a.k.a JXL, which is an open source library for accessing, generating or manipulating Microsoft Excel documents. We use version 2.6.3 of JXL because it's the recent one in the Maven repository which we use, however, at the official JXL site there are newer versions. Additionally we have log4j and Java Commons Logging (JCL), ignoring Glassfish's JSR-47 Java Util Logging (JUL) facility. Application #1 uses purely log4j and gets its log4j.xml config from a custom location. Application #2 runs Java Commons Logging with no explicite configuration file given, so JCL uses the default JUL facility of the appserver. Application #1 had been running for a long time without problems but when we installed #2 we realized that a jxl.log file had been created in the glassfish/domain/domain1/config directory and it's rapidly growing. As it happens, we

Brillien

There were three presentation as usual at the 14th Java User Meeting at Budapest yesterday, but this time I'll write only about the first one. Imre Fazekas had been invited from Debrecen to make a presentation about Brillien , their Java enterprise platform. It's an alternative way of modeling and implementing business logic in place of Java Enterprise (J2EE) Technology. It uses invasive programming model which means we have to extend classes from Brillien superclasses and we may use annotations. The whole system based on asynchronous XMPP communication and a set-context-flow concept. It's something like an application server, but uses a more logical and set-based approach. As the presenter said, it has very good speed and performance characteristics. Currently there are no IDE or other tools for editing models because this is a very young project, however a Maven plugin and a Maven archetype is accessible on the homepage. A very good introduction and tutorial can be also