1997 All Ireland Schools Programming Competition

Details of the competition appeared in Computimes. The competition finished on April 6th and the team was Eoin Curran, Robert Beattie, Paul McClave and Colin Watson. At the International Olympiad in Cape Town, Eoin Curran won a silver medal and Robert Beattie won a bronze medal. On the first day of the competition, Eoin got the same mark as the eventual winner.

The results are available. Note that in many cases, a mark of zero is recorded where in fact there should have been some marks. This will be fixed in time. We also have some solutions and test cases.

(And for those who weren't there, the problems - unfortunately in MS Word 97 format. There is a convertor that allows MSWord 6.0 to read these files somewhere in cyberspace.)

On the first day of the competition 18 people got full marks in all four problems. One of these problems came from a University Competition, and was not that easy. The fact that so many found them easy reflects on their ability as a programmer.

The second day problems weren't that much more difficult than the first, yet only one person got the first three completely correct. This may have been because competitors were tired after the first day's efforts.

Age Limit

The age limit was set from the 25th of July, so many people were in age groups that they didn't expect. (I.e. a lot of 16 year olds would have been in the under 18 age group.) I had been following the IOI age limit, but next year I intend to use the date of the prize-giving ceremony next year, and we might see about an extra age group (under 19).

If you have other suggestions, please email cdaly@compapp.dcu.ie.

Charlie Daly.