Felix Halim .NET: ACM ICPC World Final 2007 Tokyo, Japan (March 12-16, 2007)

Our team, YoiAC (from Bina Nusantara University, Indonesia) advanced to the ACM ICPC World Final 2007 by winning the ACM-ICPC Regional Kaohsiung, Taiwan 2006. Below I'll present our team story for this event.

Summary

Even though the event is 5 days (from 12 to 16), only 3 days have full time event. Below is the schedule of the ACM-ICPC World Final 2007 events, I summarized the event for each day. To view more detailed about the event for each day (with pictures), click on that particular day.

Day 1 (March 12, 2007) Team registration in the evening followed by dinner, and CyberCafe.
We arrived early in the morning (9 AM) at Narita Airport and went to Tokyo Disney Resort (where the Tokyo Hilton Bay reside). At the Hilton Tokyo Bay registration was not open yet until 3 PM so we wandered around in Tokyo Disney Resort and having "ramen" lunch there :D. In the evening, we register for the Hotel and the ACM-ICPC event along with dinner followed by CyberCafe (free: Internet, Dance-dance Revolution, Snacks, and preview about emerging technology from IBM Research and Development). The preview of IBM R&D this day is about Discussion Mining, Electronic Clipping System, PS3 Cell Programming Experience, Second Life - A Virtual World, DB2 on Rails, Clinical Discussion Support for Personal Care Connect, Extreme Blue - IBM's Unique Internship Program.
Day 2 (March 13, 2007) IBM Tech Trek presentations and excursion to Disney Sea.
In the morning we were escorted to the Ambassador Hotel for IBM Tech Trek by bus. The IBM Tech Trek title was "The Future of Technology". It comprises of 5 presentations:
1. Social Computing (by Doug Heintzman, IBM Director of Strategy, Lotus Software)
2. IBM Research and Technology of the Future (by Paul Horn, Senior Vice President, IBM Research)
3. Ruby Programming Language (by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, Creator of Ruby Language)
4. Academic Innovation and Skills for the 21st Century (by Gina Poole, IBM Vice President, Innovation and University Relations)
5. Second Life (by Doug Heintzman, IBM Director of Strategy, Lotus Software)
After the IBM Tech Trek, we got compliments from IBM which is a ticket to Disney Sea for the rest of the day and some money for lunch and dinner :D
Day 3 (March 14, 2007) Practice sessions, Japanese Cultural Experience, and CyberCafe.
Ko-ni-chi-wa (welcome) to the opening of ACM-ICPC World Final 2007 followed by practice sessions. The practice sessions were held twice. There is a Question and Answer session between the two practice sessions. The practice session went smoothly except there were teams that caught trying to hack the network and some teams were kicked out from the practice session standings because they violate the practice session script (submitting more than one problem).
In the afternoon, we enjoyed 3 of the 5 Japanese Curtural Experience classes (Shodo, Zazen, Origami, Aikido, Anime) and in the Evening we played chess in the CyberCafe.
Day 4 (March 15, 2007) ACM-ICPC World Final Contest, Awards ceremony, and Surprise event.
At 830 AM, the contest starts. There are 10 problems (from A to J). Problem B got AC in the first 24 minutes and our team reached 6th place, a good start. Sadly, the next submissions were not as good. For problem G we got RTE for wrong logic and code, WA for wrong code, and AC at last. The same thing happens with problem A: we got WA for duplicates output, WA again for not yet known mistake, WA again for fixing useless sentinel :$ because of desperation, and AC at last. A regret came after I saw problem F, this is a complete search problem that was skipped. The time wasn't enough for us to code problem F and C.
We met one of Indonesian who works for IBM as Researcher in Tokyo Research Laboratory. His name is Rudy Raymond Harry. We talked about things in IBM Tokyo.
Day 5 (March 16, 2007) Breakfast and leave (plus links and discussion).
As the title, breakfast and leave. We move to Green Hotel (it seemed that some teams also move there, I remembered the MIT team) for traveling around Tokyo.

After the world finals, there are several interesting discussions appeared in TopCoder's forums. Basically it's about wrong Judge Input Data for problem J.

Currently I'm using Picasa for displaying the photos because my website cannot hold any more photos (it only has 100 MB capacity).

These are the links to My Picasa Web Online Albums: