Jimmy's Plan (was Competition co-ordination)

Christopher Fraser (chrisf@nospam.sour.sw.oz.au)
Tue, 22 Mar 1994 19:21:57 +1000 (EST)

But I thought James Wondrasek said:
>
> The last few articles on this subject, especially those regarding the
> disadvantage of being first year, and internal competitions to choose team
> members, aren't getting us anywhere.

Yes, there's quite a lot of blathering going on.

> I think we could cover most stuff in 45min-1hour "tutes" once a week, with
> extra time set aside for practice coding sessions, etc, in 6-8 weeks.
> After which we can start to choose team members.

This is a very good idea: any questions that are asked should be answerable
from the references given. It's not fair to ask a question involving, say
Fourier transforms, when most of the contestants would not have heard of it
nor brought references to it.

GNA (The Global Network Academy) has the text of a free course in C.
Adapting this to a ``Solving Problems in C'' course would be a worthwhile
thing (perhaps the GNA people would be interested in helping us).

It's probably feasible if half-a-dozen people were prepared to contribute
a section each. Each section would have an overview of data structures
involved, a reference the a complete explanation of the required algorithms
and a sample question and implementation. (we could crib code from
previous internet competitions and the Obfuscated C Contest winners :-) )

Also, if we're going to run the competition this way, teams should be able to
ask for help with language problems, like compilation/linking errors,
simple ``how do I'' questions, getting debugging back-traces etc. Obviously,
questions about algorithms or help with debugging program errors is
a no-no. I'm happy to volunteer to do help with this.

> Does that sound like a plan?

Very.

-- 
Christopher Fraser   ``smiley-faced guys in brightly coloured space suits''
chrisf@nospam.sw.oz.au