IEEEXtreme 3.0 Feedback
By now, IEEEXtreme 3.0 should be over. This year there were about 700 teams participated in the contest- which means about 2100 competitors. In terms of number, it was a great success- I believe it was beyond organizers’ expectation. I was worried if the server will be able to handle the huge traffic. Eventually it did. Problem set was pretty standard – well defined and organized. The contest went very smooth. However, talking about the organization, I felt the contest could be better. So here are some feedback from me:
a) Numbers Could Mean More Than Just Numbers:
Even though 700 teams registered, only around 409 teams made at least one attempt of submission and 276 teams could solve at least one problem. A huge number of teams could not solve anything- that is a’right for a contest. But more than one third of teams did not attempt to submit any solution. Organizers should look into this.
b) Role of Orgnanizing Branches and Proctors:
One requirement of the contest was if some one wants to participate, his/her university branch has to host the contest and team has to have a proctor. First of all, there was no communication between the organizers and the student branches. Secondly, I am not sure why a student group would get to choose their own proctor. There could be a separate form for the student branches to fill in along with information about proctors’ information and the schedule of the tournament. Besides, students were e-mailed with their login information in the e-mail. I am not sure how organizers made sure that participants were at the location chosen by the host student branches (or did not cheat at all by having more than 3 people solving their problems). A lot of participants facebooked and twittered during the contest.
c) Lack of Clear Guideline:
It was frustrating throughout the contest how randomly information were available every where. There was no information regarding run time limit, memory limit. Until the confirmation was sent, no one knew about the supported languages (that is after registration deadline). I have seen few organizers to talk very randomly in facebook group and event page. For example, One of the organizers message was: “on September 8th, 2009 Languages supported are: Microsoft Visual C++/C#, C/C++, Java, C# and quite possibly some surprises.” and also some other organizer replied to a question “The supported languages are C, C++, C# and java and maybe some surprise languages so you should be fine.” The languages were not confirmed until registration ended. I am not sure, what kind of surprise organizers were talking about… May be by removing not only languages they claimed are going to be supported but also by changing the compilers at the last moment and some fun: Microsoft Visual C++/C#.
d) 24 Hours of Coding, Worthed?:
I personally found 24 hours of programming is quite disturbing. All participants are students, they have to go to classes- and the contest was held during the mid-term period for few regions. Most of them did not have enough sleep through out the week. Plus, course load is not equal in all the regions. In my branch (in R7), students sat for the contest at 8pm on Friday night- two of the teams had few problems solved but quit the contest after seven to eight hours. My question to the organizers will be is it really worthed having a 24 hours contest? The answer lies in the fact that 43% of the participants did not bother to submit any solution- may be did not even log in.
It is impressive how IEEEXtreme is growing over the past few years and becoming a sensation. Organizers need to start think ahead from now on. I am hoping success for the next IEEEXtreme and I know it will be a better one. 
25. October 2009 at 6:53 am :
I agree with everything you wrote here.
Furthermore, according ti the d) one, we come from Spain; we started at 2:00 a.m,
that’s a really bad hour to start anything!
I hope you have had some fun, we really enjoyed it!
) !
A little difficult, but a great experience ( it was my first time
Regards!
25. October 2009 at 10:24 am :
I think the issue with starting times is evened out by the fact that it’s a 24 hour competition. Everyone has to code between 2am-3am for their timezone, it just happened at a different time
And 24 hours is indeed extreme, but I believe it was necessary for a global competition, otherwise any choice of time will be very biased.
I agree with your comments about programming languages, however, and I was also disappointed with some of the problem statements. The time limits should have definitely been mentioned. My biggest annoyance was with problem J, though, because which the specification was actually incorrect!
Overall though, it was a very nice competition, which lived up to its name of being extreme. The teams from our school had a blast, and we are looking forward to seeing this contest become even better in the future.
25. October 2009 at 1:27 pm :
As a learning experience for all those that did participate I would love to see the problems and test cases released. For instance my team had 3 problems solved that were no able to be submitted due to “wrong answer”. So we could learn what we were doing wrong I would love to see the test cases now that the competition is over.
25. October 2009 at 1:42 pm :
@Jesus Gonzalez, glad to hear that you had fun. I know starting at 2 was not much interesting, but later I believe enjoyed it.
.. also don’t forget to participate ACM contest… they are similar, but you will have more experience.
@Miorel, talking about time, I have few friends who joined at morning after a sleep. But they must have gone through psychological disadvantage (frustrating to see that few teams solved all the problems when they were sleeping..
). The ones like me who joined, at that time, yah, we all had same time, but those who did not have time to sleep did not have fresh mind to start. That is why it is not fair game. To solve this, they can have a regional contest in 5-8 hours length and bring top 30 to one city or close cities for a day and have the contest. There might be other solutions as well..
@Jon Green, I will also propose to the organizers to release the problems. More sample input, outputs would be fun. But that is I guess also part of the problem solving test for a programmer.
25. October 2009 at 2:01 pm :
This was my first programming competition, and I loved it!
My teammates and I also had code for problems that we thought were solved, (gave the right answer for the test cases, and should have worked on larger cases) but we kept getting the “wrong answer”. I would like to see the test cases as well and for future competitions would like to see larger test cases.
25. October 2009 at 3:59 pm :
My team had solved problems but the inputs were uncertain, being in some infinite cases, without anumber N of entry for the purpose of reading the entries, leading to tricks to get a solution to this problem that does not occur in other competitions like ACM and not get a Runtime Error.
25. October 2009 at 7:33 pm :
I agree with what Tanjir said about the timing of the program. Most people were indeed having midterms the upcoming week, and if this was held earlier in the term, the turnout would have been *far* better. This also relates to why the participation (part (a)) was the way it was.
I like the whole 24-hour long idea. I mean, any less and it’s not really extreme, or any kind of endurance test, is it?
Over time, I’m sure Mooshak will get better (be more specific in what’s wrong with your code), etc. etc. but all in all, it was a great experience and I look forward to doing it again next year.