CodeVita 2K12 – A 1-2-4 Experience

Hello Friends,

This is Ashutosh, Absar and Nikita from ABES Engineering College, Ghaziabad. We were the third runner-ups in the very first edition of CodeVita.

Here we are with our wonderful journey of CodeVita – 2K12.

CodeVita, one of its kind contest, was announced by TCS last year for the first time. When we got a promotional mail through the campus commune portal, we were quite excited to know about the details and waited eagerly for it. Finally the dates were announced and the registrations started.

Team Formation:

The team formation in our case was quite interesting. It was just a matter of some phone calls which brought us altogether. Before that we had never thought of being in a team. Finally we were a team.

Though we had participated in many inter-college competitions individually but it was the first online competition for us. The scenario is different in case of online competition where your code is tested against an online judge. It was a new thing for us and the practice round helped us a lot to know what exactly the platform was and how did we need to code. The advantage with our team was that we all knew to code in both C as well as Java, though we preferred Java.

After the registrations were over the dates for the different rounds were announced. Seeing the huge number of registrations we were little bit nervous.

Round 1:

This was an online round where you need to code from your place. There were five problems and we had a time slot of 6 hours to solve them. The questions were labelled as Easy, Medium and Hard. When we had a first look at the questions, we thought those could be solved easily. But the real fun began when we solved the very first question and uploaded it to end up with a “Wrong Answer”. It was then we realized that we had missed on something. We once again read the question properly and analysed it to find certain test cases on our own especially the boundary cases. Then we worked accordingly and now with more confidence uploaded the question. To our disappointment this time we got a “Time Limit Exceeded” error. Now we realized that we really need to optimize the code and a very general approach (brute-force was what we were trying) would not suffice. Later on after some optimizations we uploaded the code and finally got “Accepted” status for our first code.

At this stage, we realized that things were not as easy as we thought them to be and we continued to code the further questions by dividing our work for the problems and having discussions on the approach as and when needed.

Finally at the end of our 6 hour slot, we had successfully solved 4 problems. We were quite relaxed but we had no idea about whether we would be selected for the further rounds.

The results were to be announced after 2-3 days. We were waiting for the results. As the results were announced, we received a mail saying that we had been moved to the second round. We were too happy but had a very little idea about our rank. To our surprise, we were on the top of the list in the first round.

It was now the time for round 2 which was after 4-5 days. We had started preparing for it from some online coding sites and solved many problems. Finally the day came.

Round 2:

Here again there were five problems as in round 1, but obviously the level of questions was better than that of round 1.

We did not repeat the same mistakes of round 1 and solved the first question quite fast. Now it was the time for the other questions which were little bit tough. Finally we ended up with solving 3 questions correctly and 1 question was almost done with some small error.

Since we had solved just three questions and competition was tough, we were disappointed by our performance and had left all our hopes for the finale.

When the results were announced we were one of the top 10 teams which were selected for the finals. We were surprised to know that and finally we were ready to go for the finale at TCS Sahyadri Park, Pune.

Final Round:

This was the toughest of all rounds and we had 9 questions to be solved in the same duration of 6 hours as in the previous rounds. It was very different from the previous rounds and the competitive environment with all the participants around us busy in coding made it more challenging. On the top of that, the challenge was increased when we were told about the live relay of codes to an audience in a different seminar hall.

After a long brainstorming session, finally the time was over and we were waiting for the results to be announced. We were happy to know that we were at the fourth place. Though we could not perform to meet our expectations but still we were satisfied.

We were awarded Provisional Job Offer Letter, Internship Offer with TCS R&D, IEEE Student Membership and a digital photo frame.

After CodeVita:

CodeVita was a great experience for us which involved a lot of fun and learning (and of course coding). It helped us to gain confidence and thus we participated in many online competitions on CodeChef and HackerRank which is still continuing.

We all have now completed our B.Tech(CSE). Absar and Nikita are now a part of TCS family and I am continuing my further studies (M.Tech CSE @IIT Guwahati).

We are thankful to TCS for organising such a great event and also to Mr. Amol Khanapurkar who provided us this opportunity to share our experience.

Now its time for the second edition of the event which is being conducted at a much larger scale. If you have little interest in coding you should surely give it a shot. It’s a wonderful opportunity which should not be missed in any case.

The experience makes us to wish that we could be one of the participants in this edition too.

Few Guidelines:

1. Read the problem carefully and consider all the cases (even the worst ones you can think of).
2. File handling, Error handling, I/O operations and Input validations are the areas you should be comfortable with.
3. Avoid wasting time searching for the solutions of the questions on internet. Rather try to work out on your own and write your own code.
4. Plagiarism is prohibited, so don’t share you code even with your best friend as it may land up both of you in trouble and may even lead to disqualification.
5. Use the same version of compilers as specified as those will be used on the online judge irrespective of the version you are using.
6. Never be in hurry and don’t panic. Stay calm while solving the problems.

All the Best for CodeVita’13!!!

KEEP CODING !!!