So long, and thanks for EVERYTHING….

– on behalf of the Exun Batch of 2005

Google’s looking out for employees for its R&D center at Bangalore and is organising a programming competition all over South East Asia to find the best people. The first prize is Rs.3 lakhs. Although people 18 years or older are eligible to recieve the prize, age is not a limitation for registration, which is free. Programs can be coded in C++ or Java. Since the gcc compiler is being used, I recommend people familiar only with the Borland Turbo C++ compiler we use to go through this page to get familiar with the slight differences. I would suggest all programmers who know C++ to register, especially the ones in 11. You should go and try out the practice problems before the competition, the qualifications rounds of which will be conducted online on 27th Feb.

Hi from Chennai! The final (national level) round of the Young Talent Search In Computer Programming organised by The Computer Society of India took place today at Rajlakshmi College, which was 55-65 kms away from Chennai.The final comptetion was very well organised. Although the bus ride to the engineering college was not a very pleasant one, the computer labs were good and so was the event. The questions, their submission and correction was also co-ordinated in a very orderly manner. Our team(Swati, Souvik and myself) were awarded the second prize out of about 11 teams – 4 from Delhi, 1 each from Kanpur,Kolkata and Durgapur etc. We will also be representing India along with the team which stood first(Kolkata) in two upcoming International Competitions, one of which is at IIT-Madras on the 20th of Nov. and the other one is during the second week of December at Singapore. Chennai is very hot.

As Dhruv had metioned, it was a very unexpected win as only 7 of us had participated in 4 events. He’s also told you the results so i’m not going all over them again. The programming event surprisingly had a 10 minute prelimnary round where we had to answer 14-15 logic based questions and 15 schools were selected. The main event was for ane and a half hours and had 4 questions which you can download by clicking here. The event was not organised in a proper way as the judges didn’t even have sample outputs and would sit and check each output maually or run their program on another PC and check. If any of the junior programmers of Exun want to, they can mail their solutions (C++) to [email protected]. Infact, i would like all the class XI Exun Programmers to solve the paper.

Very few people turned up for the test. We were anyways not expecting much attendence due to lack of advertisement for this event. However, all the six people who did give the test have cleared the prelim. The questions were divided in three levels, level III being the most difficult one. Points were also awarded accordingly. The response was not very encouraging as only two people managed to get a level III question right, but on the other hand, no one fared badly. The results are as follows:

• Raghav Arora (VIII-C) : Scored the maximum no. of points, but wasn’t able to get a single Level III question right, which was dissapointing.
• Rahul Bhatnagar (VIII-L) : Second position, one correct level III answer.
• Mohit Deep Singh (VIII-C) : Third, one correct level III answer.

Due to lack of participation, we will soon be organising another logic test for class VIII. As mentioned earlier, the six people who gave the tests today do not have to give this upcoming test as they all cleared the prelimnary test. People will be chosen from both the batches. You can download the questions and try them.The solutions are also available here.

We participated in only three events out of a total of five as we neither had a participant for Group Discussion nor a software to submit for software Display. The events which we did participate in were Gaming, Web Designing and Senior Programming. Souvik could not make through the qualifiers of the Gaming event due to keyboard problems. The game was Unreal Tournament and the frag limit was just 10. Vansh and Rasagya were declared third in the Web Designing event. Swati and myself won the Senior Programming. We did not think we could have won the programming event as the last (fourth) question we had to do was to make an analog clock with the hour, minute and seconds hand. The clock had to work i.e. show the time. Neither of us (me and Swati) had any idea about graphics in C++, but with the C++ help file we were able to make a pretty nice clock which worked! As we were the only ones who had got all the questions right, we won. I don’t think there was a trophy for the overall winning school.