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 !!!

Codevita Guidelines from Winners of 2012

Hello Everyone,

     This is Akshay, Abhay and Rhushikesh from Walchand College of Engineering, Sangli. We stood 1st in Codevita in it's very first version last year which was like the best thing happened with us till date. We would like to share our wonderful experience with you all.

Begin:

     It all started when TCS started promoting about their very first National Level Coding challenge - Codevita 2012. When we heard about it, we thought to register for it and we were like 'it's National level programming contest man and how can we win it?' (This is our Negative Mind that speaks!). Many of you might be thinking like that currently. But, ultimately we registered because we were inspired by the thought,

" You Miss 100% of the shots that you don't take! "

 And I guess, everyone of you should follow the same.

     Team Formation: We are not going to advise on this. But, it would be great if you form a team in way that your team members are quite comfortable in at least 2 languages. Because there are some things that can be done easily in specific language. Abhay was C Expert, Rhushikesh and I preferred Java.

Journey:

{
     After all registration process, the date of 1st round was announced and it was on the day before our In-Semsester exam at College. We were thinking whether should we attempt or not. But, again we gave a shot which ultimately paid off. 

     The online coding round system was new to us, as we all had experience of Inter-college competitions. The Major difference between such competitions and online coding round is, in later you can not convience unless it's perfectly right. In case of online coding round, your code gets tested against the Test cases that are already generated. So, your code has to go successfully throught each and every test case, otherwise it will not get accepted.

Coding Rounds:

     You might be knowing the rules and guidelines by now. In first round we had 5 problems statements to solve. And after reading them, we thought they were quite easy. But, after creating solution file and uploading it we got error message that, Wrong Answer !

     Then we realized that you need to re-look all edge cases and corners for our code to get 'Accepted'. It's very important to read the Problem statement very carefully, otherwise you will surely miss some part of it and later you won't find that because of your ignorance. After the end of first round we were not sure about our selection for the second round.

     When the results of the First round were announced, We started looking from bottom of the list to find our name(Like the same scene from '3 idiots' !). Totally, 269 students were shortlisted for the second round of it. And we were not in 200-269, then 100-200 but at last we found our team standing at 12th place. So, we were really enthusiastic about second round now.

     The second round was very similar to first one but difficulty level was higher than that of first one. We gave our best but we thought if they select around 30-40 for the final round then we might get selected. And when the results of second round were out, we stood 9th and they had selected only 10 for the final round and were invited at TCS Sahyadri Park, Pune for the Final round.

Now, it was really getting hotter as it was final round and we were among Top 10 from all over India. Certainly it was a great feeling and we were quite contained with it. But, Thanks to All our Friends who encouraged us to go and Win it all.

Final Round:

      Yes, it was Sahyadri Park, TCS, Pune. It was great atmosphere and it was TCS where we could visit. It was a great place where we all had to code to win. The Final round was of 6 hours and the level of difficulty was even more than previous rounds. This was the chance where we could prove ourselves. We put our best in final round and ultimately we were the Winners. One just needs to be Cool and not panic in such rounds.

}

End:

     For us the End of Codevita is like Beginning of the new Journey as it opened Many new opportunities for us. First thing - We had Apple - iPads, TCS - provisional offer letters, IEEE student membership accounts. TCS also gave us opportunity to do Internship at Tata Research Development and Design Center, Pune which is the first Research and Development lab of TCS in India. The internship was a really bronze experience for all of us. We worked with senior scientists and learned a lot from them. Thanks to TCS and TRDDC for that.

We are really thankful to all TCS for providing such a huge opportunity. And as they are doing it again, we must say you should participate in this competition and don't miss this opportunity !!

Few Guidelines:
     1. If you want to practice or get feel of such competition then there are many websites like codechef, hackerrank which can provide a helpful experience.
     2. Read problem statement very carefully. (Don't miss out any statement)
     3. Think about all the test cases. (Never think Internet will help you solving a problem statement)
     4. Be comfortable with file handling and basic input output operations that are required.
     5. Solve easy problem statement first, instead of going into complicated things.
     6. Keep it simple.

You can reach any of us at:

Akshay Mohite, Abhay Doke, Rhushikesh Apte
And  for details of Codevita 2013, you can contact Amol Khanapurkar

All the Best for Codevita 2013 !!