Topcoder Open 2022 Day 1 Recap
Topcoder Open 2022 Day 1 Recap
The first day of TCO22 was an exciting day, with multiple highlights.
Check out the full events of this awesome action-packed day here!
The set up
Once the event opened up at 08:00 TC time (UTC-5), participants started pouring into the Notified virtual event platform. We had the chance to surf around a few pages and take part in TC trivia for leaderboard points, all the while joining the live event room with the custom chatroom quickly filling up with activity.
Before the TCO competitions, we got to hear greeting and announcements from none other than Jessie Ford, aka jmpld40, the ultimate TCO queen, alongside Topcoder CEO, Doug Hanson - dhanson!
The Topcoder team also gave their best wishes and encouragements to the finalists, and we saw the various finalists introduce themselves in the kickoff session.
Soon after this, we got the pleasure of hearing a captivating presentation by Caroline Uhler, Ph.D. from the Broad Institute on a new Data Science project on studying Cancer Immunology launching on Topcoder in cooperation with the Broad Institute in January! The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute of MIT is a leading biomedical and genomic reseach institute, making this new Data Science round an important and exciting one.
Next was a presentation by the Topcoder Team on our currently running
Crowd For Good initiative at Topcoder. Winners from the latest Data Science match joined for expert commentary on the competition and their approach, with a following Q&A session.
After a quick break for getting a coffee and participating in the Trivia games, it was time for the Marathon Finals!
Marathon final
In the Marathon Match final competition, the top-performing Marathon track competitors from this year gathered to compete against each other in an intense (to say the least) 24-hour competition. Their task was to optimize placing fruits on a gameboard, when deleting lines of the same fruit will give you points, somewhat similar to Tetris. This difficult computational problem required strong heuristic skills for the competitors to develop code that is able to make the best possible decisions.
Competing in this round were a combination of seasoned TCO veterans, as well as TCO first-timers. The 12 participants were blackmath, bowwowforeach, eulerscheZahl, iehn, mugurelionut, nika, Psyho, simanman, Stonefeang, sullyper, vdave, wleite.
The results of the round will be announced on Saturday at the final TCO22 Awards Ceremony.
Algorithm Semi-final 1
In the first Algorithm Semi-final of TCO22, we had bqi343, Stonefeang, maroon_kuri, kotatsugame, Um_nik, Eryx, ksun48 and lyrically compete against each other for placement in the live Algorithm Final competition happening on Saturday. Expert commentary was given by a star-studded panel consisting of ecnerwal, neal_wu, scott_wu and the reigning Algorithm champion tourist.
The point distribution of the three problems was a nonstandard 300-600-1000. Most contestants started with the Easy problem, and most were able to solve it in a reasonable time, considering it was a bit more difficult than a 250-points problem. One contestant, lyrically, decided to go for the 1000-point problem first, and spend most of the competition on their solution, which unfortunately did not pass system tests. In the end, the Easy and Medium challenge were the determining problems for advancing to the finals. Everyone who successfully solved both advanced to the finals, and those who failed system tests or submitted only one problem were not able to advance this round.
The second Semi-final will happen tomorrow, on Friday. The round will determine the final four advancers to the ultimate Final round on Saturday, can't miss it!