| Notes on the Problem Set | Last modified Oct 8 2009 |
The Regional Chief Judges (Andy Harrington and Gabriel Foust) and the Regional Director (John Cigas) rank the problems roughly as follows, with the author's name in parentheses:
There is a vast range of difficulties. We expect most teams to get one or more of the easy ones. RIPOFF and Black Vienna require more advanced, but standard training (dynamic programming, enumerating subset combinations). Up and Down is more than a simple wrapper on a shortest path problem. A to Z Numerals might deceive teams, thinking it is relatively easy at the start, but the rule changes from Roman Numerals require much thought.We expect a few teams to solve seven or eight problems, but none to solve all nine. We believe we have accomplished our basic goals on the hardest problems: short descriptions, relatively short code, but requiring a lot of thinking outside the box, so we find the most worthy teams to go on to compete in China in February!
Special thanks this year to John Cigas for doing double duty as Regional Director and problem writer! We need your help spreading out the work next year! We could really use a third chief judge like we have had in past years.