The finals was an awesome atmosphere. We arrive at our tables to be greeted by an animated version of John from IBM telling us to NOT TOUCH ANYTHING. The count down to the start of the contest begins, and its under way. It was really amazing watching all these guys from all over the world coding hard and fast. The time flew by so quickly. We got one problem out in around 180 minutes, with several others still trying to be completed. 2 minutes remaining, and we are so close to getting a problem out (Problem B). We ran a whole lot of console debugging stuff, trying to work out this little thing that's stopping our problem running correctly. Then they start counting down. We can't access the system, its frozen. (Go go unprioritised cpu cycles for gui in Fedora). So Ctrl Alt F1 - kill process. No.. lets stall on that too. The contest is finished, we have a computer doing some sort of setup in console. We broke it :(
Anywoo, we still got the one problem out, albeit an hour slower than NZ (we were working on another uncompleted problem first). So NZ are region champions, and we all had a lot of fun.
Overall winners were St. Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics and Optics, with the following regional winners:
| Asia | Tsinghua University |
| Africa and the Middle East | University of Cape Town |
| Europe | St. Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics and Optics |
| Latin America | Universidad de Buenos Aires |
| North America | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| South Pacific | University of Auckland |
Also, congrats to MIT for coming in a close 2nd.
Full results: http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/Finals/v2/default.asp?page=results
The final celebrations were fun, with the Raspini Brothers jugglers and a hypnotist entertaining the crowd. The hypno guy was weird, he was making the people on stage do silly things, but I don't need any encouragement to be silly.. so it didn't work on me, and I got kicked off the stage early :( Meh
A big shoutout to the teams from U of Florida, U of Illinois and U of Auckland: you guys are awesome!
I would totally like to go again next year, but unless I help out as an assistant coach, it won't happen. I graduated last year :) So well done everyone and I hope to hear good things from this years regionals and next years world finals :)