Woefully unprepared

Speaking of lobsters, today we had (I’ll explain we later) our first practice run for the ACM programming competitions. It was fun and informative but incredibly awful insomuch as we weren’t able to complete a single problem. There are two teams that are being trained over the summer to compete in the fall and I am on one of those teams. The two other members of my team are Jon and Nick. That is really all you need to know about them other than the fact that they can both type considerably faster than I can. Also none of us know Java very well any more. As it turned out we picked a question that looked simple at first glance but then turned out to take - well longer than 3 hours to finish. It was basically the question about comparing Poker hands - simple enough concept, but there are a lot of rules to consider. Despite our short coming, I had a lot of fun realizing just how bad I am at hacky Java programming. Oh and Unix keyboards suck. I only wish that we could have used PHP - that would have been fun and more successful.

If anyone wants to check out some problems, check out this archive located at the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain.