Winning the 4th Edition of Discover Thinking Contest by CSI
Winning the 4th Edition of Discover Thinking Contest by CSI
"Best Things Happens Unexpectedly"
- Secured a rank in National 50 in DTC CSI and got invite to 51st Annual Convention of CSI, 2016 , Coimbatore with full cost coverage.
From last few months, most of my days are being spent contributing to Open Source Projects. One such day, I came across Discover Thinking Contest by CSI. It was a while since I did competitive programming and had no mood to participate in this contest.
The contest participation was open for a whole day of 11th Jan, 2017. It was in the night, when I was getting really bored, I decided to give this contest a try. (Better than sitting idle huh !!)
It was a 3 hour contest with 5 questions. The contest was do or die contest. You can't go to next question until you answer the current question. The judge supported most of the programming languages out there, so it was not a problem for anyone.
The questions were the tricky one with each question a blend of Data Structures, File Handling, and Algorithms. None of the question could have been done if you don't have strong understanding of File Handling in your respective language.
The question demanded to read a input.txt file that could be anywhere in the target directory , execute your code on that input in given time complexity and save your output in specified format (was different for every question) in output.txt which should be saved in the same directory as target directory.
To further add to this, the question needed a good understanding of Data Structures. I remember a question in which I had to make my own Data Structure using Java Class, use HashMap, use Queue and a Linked List. The solution got so big that I was sometimes lost in my own code.
Well, I ended up answering all five of them in just time. Given my previous failures in competitive programming I had no hope whatsoever that I will win this out of 11000 participants from all over the country.
But I did !! Coming back from college, I got a mail which congratulated me. I was dumbstruck for few minutes. I convinced myself that it must be a prank but it wasn't. I won it.
The prize was a full cost coverage to attend the 51st Annual Convention of CSI at Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu.
My First Flight !!
Le Meridien Hotel, Coimbatore !!
Awarded by CSI Head !!
It was a 3 day convention with eminent speakers from all over the world. I got to meet several professors from IIT's, Researchers, professionals from top notch industries like Adobe, Microsoft, KPMG, etc. There was so much to learn in just 3 days.
What I loved the most was the cultural diversity. People from different parts of country, from girls to boys, students to professionals, startups to big IT players, all of them a part of technology.
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